


The Cold Light of Stars

by Smarterinabsentia



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: AU, F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:08:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 35,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24601345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smarterinabsentia/pseuds/Smarterinabsentia
Summary: In a not-so-distant future, Maggie Sawyer works as an investigator for the outer colonies. She's come here to forget Alex and toy with self-destruction, but an accident aboard the Shanti-Asona reveals that the past can catch up with you anywhere.This is not a Dansen fic. Other characters may appear later, but this is will be centered on Sanvers and mostly Maggie.The isolation was getting to me and wouldn't let go.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer
Comments: 171
Kudos: 69





	1. Gravity

_“But what am I going to see?_  
  
_I don't know. In a certain sense, it depends on you.”_

Stanislaw Lem

_Hey, Jim._

_We know you’re hurting. We get it. We heard and we’re hurting, too. For her. For you. And we’re here for you. (Shakes head in disgust.) I’m sorry. That sounded hollow. I know h-how this sounds from so far away. (Turns away from the camera. Faces forward.) We love you, James. None of us is going to forget her. So, j-just don’t do it, James. I can’t be clear on this thing as it could make things worse for you. I only hope that you understand. I only hope it’s not true and when you get this message, you’ll laugh your laugh and tell me I’m back on my bullshit again. (Looks back at someone.) I don’t have much time. Had to pull some serious strings to hack the pulse feed, but James. Jim. if it’s true and you do know what I’m talking about, we love you. All of us are waiting for you. So, please. Don’t._

_Qubit Feed Communique from Kelly Maria Olsen. Origin point. Earth. Alcubierre transfer points. Io. Fomalhaut X-17. Delayed transmission at Shuntshen 22b. Estimated receipt date: 3.17.2085 Earth, PST._

Like so many things in Maggie's life, this one starts with an explosion.

She’s on the passenger ship Shanti-Asona, paying the price of a four-star meal for a pint bottle of Koshu as she tries to talk a woman—Annie, she thinks her name is?—into bed. But she isn’t really that into Annie because she keeps looking over her bare shoulder to watch LK-476, home to the Haxen mining colony, shrink into the black.

 _Looks like a turd,_ she thinks, not for the first time. 

She thought this when she’d arrived, straight off a U.P. freighter to work a murder case.

Axel Zofia, 54, Efficiency Manager for Haxen Mining Corporation.

Poisoned with lithweed and strangled, his body dangled from a window above LK-476’s Tarquin Square.

An easy case. Mercifully quick.

Zofia was cutting corners on safety measures and tat-scraping, altering the digital signatures imprinted into miners’ skin to make it look like they’d clocked out.

This kind of shit is endemic in the outer colonies. And Maggie finds it morbidly funny that the U.P. pays her handsomely to solve the murders of rich men rather than crack down on their shitty labor practices. It’s funny, and it isn’t. So, she made sure that by the time she found Zofia’s killer, she’d exposed Haxen’s on-site shenanigans in the process.

The tatting.

The embezzlement.

The coercion of fresh recruits into prostitution.

She takes a long pull from her glass and directs her gaze back at Annie. 

“You all right?” Annie asks. 

“Yeah.” She’s getting drunk but can’t quite seem to stop herself. She nods at her drink, a ‘lite’ beer, barely registering it when Annie tries to signal the bartender, a real one. Old school affect, just as the wall of silicate glass behind her provides an actual view of stars. It’s a mixed crowd here tonight, miners and Haxen execs. The latter never come alone. Their Gemels flicker around them like assiduous ghosts, ordering drinks and holding the line, maintaining conversation with potential conquests while their prototypes run off to relieve themselves or do a line of shock powder in the bathroom. One of them flits between Annie and the bartender, signals, far more gracefully than his twin ever could, for a vodka martini. Guess which one the bartender pays attention to?

Annie clicks her tongue. “Casper got the jump on me.”

“That’s sentientist,” Maggie says, feeling her skin prickle. Gemels are sentient holos, generated from their owners’ subconscious, and calibrated to keep that id tightly in check. The work of Darwin Elias, Gemels were meant as a form of therapy until he realized he’d created, if not fully sentient A.I., then as close as it was likely to get.

The court of Mihara has just ruled them conscious, and therefore worthy of rights.

Annie shrugs as if she doesn’t care. Maybe she hasn’t kept up to date on the feeds.

“What’s the point?”

“Point of what?” Maggie asks. 

“Coming to a real bar to have your hololackey wait in line for you?”

Maggie smiles, relieved she won’t be spending any more money on this woman, although Annie’s words aren’t that far from reality. The Mihara court is respected but their rulings are largely symbolic. It will take years, maybe decades, for Gemel liberation. But until then, when they aren’t being used in an array of therapies, they’ll remain in servitude to the rich.

Only someone desperate or a sociopath would need one of those things, she thinks. She talks to herself enough as it is, and now that she’s on a slow boat to Earth, her tone has taken on a brand new edge. 

Of all people, it’s her father who’s dragging her back. He died six months ago, and despite not speaking to her for the last twenty-four years, he left her the family farm along with a slumlord apartment building in downtown Blue Springs. 

“Maybe he had a change of heart," her lawyer said.

It was more like he didn’t have anyone left. 

She downs the rest of her drink and decides to let it go with Annie. It’s a long trip, after all. Three months to Para Junction and another three after the transfer to Io Flipstation. She should let herself relax, maybe feel grateful that the investigation went quickly, but Maggie isn’t doing this because she isn’t in the bar. Not anymore.

She’s sprawled flat in the corridor of Petal 4, one of the Asona’s passenger mods, her lungs seared with smoke and her head throbbing as the emergency lights flicker and the maddeningly sedate voice of Harbor, the onboard system, reassures her that the atmosphere has stabilized. 

She _was_ with Annie. 

She remembers her words slurring as her joke failed to land. She remembers Annie’s lips curving into a smile even as her eyes failed to crinkle.

The bar was playing Frank Sinatra. 

That weird-ass album he did about space. 

_When I arrive at Venus_

_It will surely be spring_

The music on these ships. 

Annie eyes Maggie’s now empty bottle and offers to tussle Casper for another. Maggie demurs and thanks her, happy to be giving her an out. 

There’s a rumble. Vibrations tickle her feet as Frank stutters through the speakers. 

_It will surely be spring_

_And the girl_

_Girl_

_Girl_

_I have waited for, will be wai—_

_Girl_

A wave of scattered laughter. She sees the guests fall back in their seats, grinning nervously as their bottles rattle and clink. 

“Someone tossed their bot out the window,” one of the execs says.

Laughter. Another rattle. They look at each other. A few get up, lean into the silicate pane for reassurance. There’s an accumulation of silence beneath the faltering music. It piles on thick like smoke. A Gemel takes the initiative and floats above them for a better look, his expression, a full palette of emotion in comparison to his counterpart’s dull stare, tells the whole story. 

Then someone, it might even be Annie, screams.

_Life support systems stabilized. Oxygen levels at 60% and climbing. If you are injured, alert me to your location and an evacdrone will come anon._  
  


Light flares and subsides beneath closed lids. Harbor won’t shut up.

Maggie opens her eyes and the tracking lights dotting the floor cross her vision like a bright trail of crumbs. She tastes salt in her mouth and tongues around, relieved to discover she’s bitten her cheek. No teeth lost. This is good. She pushes herself onto her back, hands sliding in a slick of her own blood. There’s something poking from her thigh. Not a bone, thank god. A thin piece of broken tubing. 

It’s not that far in. So she risks it, yells as she yanks it out, although it’s more from shock than pain. The wound isn’t deep. Her trousers are soaked, but that’s not her blood she’s sitting in. She turns, her muscles screaming, to see Auxpilot Deuvim. She’s slumped beneath the manual controls for the outer hatch, her eyes open, a piece of shrapnel in her back. 

A memory punches its way to the surface.

Deuvim’s hand on the back of her neck, firm as a cat’s teeth, as they fly through the corridor. The gravity plate’s blown in the Central Hub, but Deuvim is dressed for the outdoors, pushing them forward through the air with the jets in her suit. She must have been doing maintenance. A lucky coincidence. Just not for her. 

She shoves Maggie forward into Petal 4, and Maggie twists her body just enough to keep from hitting face-first as the gravity kicks in. She staggers, turns to see Deuvim make a graceful landing as a scattering of debris shoots toward them like buckshot. On a weightless trajectory, it should skirt Deuvim’s head by at least a foot, but the gravity in Petal 4 is active, and while she seals the hatch, a shard of metal arcs down and spears her where she stands. Maggie jumps forward, presses that last command as pain shoots through her leg, and the door falls to crush the encroaching flames.

She glances over at Deuvim’s lifeless body. “I owe you one, friend.”

She doesn’t, didn’t really, know Deuvim, but the words feel appropriate.

Then, one hand pressed to her wound, she grabs the walkrail and forces herself to stand. 

The command center is just up ahead. It's helmed this trip by Deuvim and her co-pilot Bates, who was off-duty tonight. Each of the Asona’s petals can run independently of Central Hub. They're built to be replaceable and a safeguard in emergencies. Deuvim’s leaving her post to go outside of all things was a clear dereliction, but she’ll think about that later.

She half hopes as the doors open to Command that she’ll see Bates back from his night out. He’d been in the bar earlier. She’d even given him a wave when he’d left on the arm of a handsome Telusian. She takes his empty seat, and with the burn still raw in her throat, she speaks.

#

Ask her now, and Maggie Sawyer, U.P. Detective Peregrine class, will tell you she doesn’t want to be here. Of course, she doesn’t. She never did. 

What she wanted to do more than anything was prove a point, one even she wasn’t clear on. So, she let recklessness and resolution meet in the middle and royally fuck up her life.

“Want to keep going like this?” Alex said. Maggie had just lifted her shirt to reveal the graze of a bullet. “Want me to identify you in the morgue. Is that how you get my attention?”

That was somewhere near the end; they’d been at each other for months. 

“We got him, Alex. A twenty-year cold case. And you frame it as a joyride.”

“I didn’t—” Alex pressed her fingers to her eyelids, let out a controlled breath as she massaged them.

“I’m allowed to be ambitious,” Maggie said.

Alex shook her head, one side of her mouth curving stiffly. “That’s not ambitious, Maggie. It’s suicidal.”

It was a repeat line. Cliché, even. Alex wasn’t even putting in the effort anymore. Somewhere between her whirlwind proposal and their wedding date, their happy life of brutal work schedules and patience began to unravel. Alex sprang the idea of children, of a house somewhere with a nursery and a little more green. For Maggie, it was like the end of an ancient cartoon, where the mask came off and her fiancé was some Mom in a Titan subdivision. 

_Would have had my picket fence if it weren’t for you meddling—_

They’d fought and they’d fucked, and then they’d just fought, and when that didn’t get them anywhere, Alex turned away and redirected her life. She moved out, resigned from her position with U.P. Security Operations, and took a job at a sliding-scale clinic serving the alien community where she “fell in love” with a colleague. A therapist. That was rich. 

When she’d gotten that news, something in Maggie snapped. It wasn’t just the speed at which she’d moved on, but that she’d done it so precisely to plan; the intimation being that Alex had a plan and Maggie didn’t. That Alex was living her life the way she wanted while Maggie was, in her hard-headed pursuit of justice, just letting life happen to her. So Maggie made her own decision. 

She would proceed in line with her role in this drama, act according to the qualities Alex had attributed to her. She quit her job at the precinct, signed on as an investigator for the outer colonies: hellholes offering huge paychecks and desperate for any semblance of law and order. If Alex accused her of romancing danger, then Maggie would live as dangerously as she could. And, if she made it through a few tours, she’d come home with a generous and early retirement.

The best revenge wasn’t living well. It was surviving.


	2. Binary Star

“Harbor, patch me through to Central.” Maggie waits, watches the dead console for what seems like minutes until she remembers. She sighs and leans over the com, some part of her registering that this show of irritation is already a luxury best left in the past. “Let's try again. Sawyer, Margarita Elena. U.P Special Investigator, Peregrine Class, Badge Number T1128. ” 

The console flickers to life and she lifts her gaze to the infrared light. Harbor’s voice is as still as the surface of a lake. “Clearance granted to Sawyer, Margarita Elena—”

“It’s Mag—” She stops herself, her tongue feels thick and she’s woozy with pain. The odor of burnt copper clings to the air. “Just patch me through.”

“Central is offline.”

“Then Petal…” Her mind stalls on the numbers. “The-the others.”

“All petals are offline.”

“All of them?”

"No incoming or outgoing activity on main feeds or subchannels.”

Sweat stings her eyes, seeps into a cut on her face. She dabs at her skin with her sleeve. The damage to the Asona must be bad.Very bad.

“Anyone else aboard this one?”

It’s a stupid question, but she lets herself hope for as long as it takes to ask. Save Deuvim, Bates, and a few maintenance workers who spent most of their time in the Hub, Number 4 is empty. Its bunks had been reserved for miners who opted to stay ashore after a tunnel collapse took out a third of their crew. The Shanti-Asona was already en route for LK-427 when it happened, starting a slow crawl from Tekris Minor one week before the accident. Docking soon after Maggie arrested Zofia's killer. 

57 dead in that tunnel. 

They were the motive for Mathieu Severn, just 22. Younger brother of Radke Severn who’d been buried with the others. It was easy enough to whittle down the suspects. Miners rarely came with family. They said their goodbyes, put in their three years, and floated home with fat paychecks to show for cheating spouses and disaffected children. The miners on LK-427 made enough to retire. They were extracting Kyrenium, a rare and priceless substance that could power up an Alcubierre drive without the need of a nearby gas giant. Severn had hacked the blueprints for the tunnel in his datapad, found evidence for Zofia’s cost-cutting. He'd confessed eagerly enough. 

“If Radke isn’t going home, then neither am I. And neither is Zofia.” That last part came like an afterthought, as if Zofia was truly gone from his thoughts now that he’d strangled him. 

Maggie couldn’t blame the kid. She just wished he hadn’t ruined his life.

“Uninhabited. No biosignatures outside of Command and greenhouse.”

 _You knew it,_ she tells herself. Her leg spasms painfully as she shifts in her seat. She’ll need to go to medbay. See to her injuries, but first. 

“Distress beacon.”

"Inactive.” 

This is bullshit. A beacon would have pinged at the first sign of trouble.

“How about making it active then?” 

“All outgoing communication feeds are offline.”

“What about the pulse beacon?”

A radio distress call traveling at light speed would take a month to reach Para Junction, but each ship has a qubit transmitter, capable of sending small packets of information through wormholes. They're volatile and prohibitively expensive, installed for onboard emergencies only, but the pulse should have pinged automatically. It was the black box on every interstellar transport.

“No Casimir energy signatures detected.”

The clock on the console reads 04:18. Maggie presses her palms to her forehead, tries to remember.

“Harbor, when was the last outgoing?”

“Last dispatch at 23:14.56.”

“Nothing after that?”

“Negative. Nothing else logged.”

She was in the bar at least until midnight. The comms wouldn’t have all gone dark, which meant that whatever caused the accident was well underway before things blew. She looks down at her trousers, torn and caked with blood, most of it not her own.

_Deuvim_

Deuvim was outside. She’d left her post. 

Had she noticed something was wrong? Maybe she'd tried to contact Central only to get static. But why go outside alone when she could have shuttled in just as fast and gotten help? 

Maggie pushes herself up, nearly vomits as the room starts to spin. She leans against the chair until it steadies. She’ll need to get back inside Central. There are other people there, trapped like she is. Communications are fucked up but Occam’s razor and all that.

Hope lodges in her chest just long enough for her to take a step, enough for her legs to buckle. She falls forward, palms smacking painfully against the tile, and sits in a crawl until the pounding in her head dims to a thrum. She gazes up at the sun shield now blocking the view of the outside and feels her body shiver with cold. 

“Harbor, raise the shield, would you?” She’s asking now. She doesn’t like that she’s asking because that means she’s afraid.

There’s a clicking sound as the latches lift, a low hum as the shell rises from the glass in a slow and dreadful reveal.

 _Like ripping off a Band-Aid_ , she thinks. _The one that’s stopping you from bleeding out._

A view of the black, spattered by cold white stars. The curve of Petal 4’s loading dock protrudes like a diving board into oblivion. No sign of the familiar octagon of Central, the cruciform appendages of Petals 1, 2 and... 3, what’s left of it, tumbles in the black, a package discarded and set afire. 

#

Alex did try to warn her. Called her in her hotel room the night before she went up. 

“Winn said you're leaving. Is it true?"

Maggie slumped against the wall and stared at the two compact black suitcases already packed and stowed near the door. Of course, this would have to happen. A clean break just wasn't possible. 

“Winn’s mouth cuts both ways,” she said. “He told me you were—”

“Just be honest with me. For once.”

Maggie froze at the belligerence in Alex’s tone, at that faint hint of ownership. She was slurring her words. 

“Yes. It's tomorrow. Early.” She felt a prickle of anger at what that voice could still do to her. The old grooves worn in from their fights had yet to be sanded off. “Winn told me you were expecting.”

“And he'd be wrong.”

“Guess not, if you’re three sheets to—” The words stalled in her throat. “I’m sorry, Alex. That was fucked up.”

She expected Alex to hang up on her, but instead, she grew painfully silent. Maggie cursed herself, forcing herself to listen to that stillness until Alex spoke again. This time, her voice was soft. 

“Don’t go.”

“Alex...” Maggie closed her eyes. _Damn it_. 

“I-I just don’t know why you wouldn’t tell me." She was crying now and Maggie turned toward the balcony, peered through the glass to see Hedley’s Lift winding like a cord into the pink skies of the Cape. She'd be thinking of this moment during that four-hour climb into orbit.

“They need people,” she said. "People who don't have shitty records."

“They don’t need _you._ ” Alex sniffled and took a moment to catch her breath. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. You know what they do to cops out there.” 

“And what cops do to others,” Maggie said. “That’s why I'm going.”

Part of that was true. It wasn’t all about the money or the desire for escape. 

“I’m sorry. I really should have told you.” She wanted ask Alex why she’d stifled the news of her engagement or the wedding date—not that Maggie would have been invited. Not that she would have gone. “I’ve got an early shuttle.”

“O-okay.” Alex was trying for restraint now and Maggie felt her stomach knot.

“You take care of yourself, okay? Send a message through the ether sometime? Let me know how you’re doing?” 

“Okay. I...” 

More silence. She could see Alex in her mind, that rapid-fire nod whenever she went contrite after a fight. She heard her take in a breath, like she was building up the courage to speak, and so Maggie cut the line, felt herself sink as the phone powered down, and Alex's ID flickered and went black.

They’d spun around that same cold star so many times. It was time for her to break orbit. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told myself I was going to write fast and not fret on this one, but the logistics were murder in this section.  
> Thanks for reading.


	3. Relativity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I tried, really, really tried for a full-on, hard SF approach to this, but doing so would not allow me to incorporate the hard SF elements I need, which makes NO sense, but there it is. Suffice to say, the star map has been altered, but only for story purposes. Happy Tanabata!

Maggie Sawyer has always had problems. Now she has three.

Big ones.

She’s alone on a ship in deep space.

The comms are down.

Everybody's dead.

Almost. 

She whistles through cracked lips as she makes her way to the medbay. She could let the boomseat carry her, but that feels like giving in. So she puts her weight against it and uses it like a walker. Alex would tease her for this, call her stubborn, ridiculous. 

_You do know you’re stretching your recovery time._

“You aren’t here,”Maggie says. She’s losing it. She knows this. None of this is Alex’s fault. Alex isn’t here.

And yet she is.

Always. 

Flitting around her consciousness like a wreath of stars around some clobbered cartoon character. 

When her transport on Figueres hobbled in for a crash landing.

_Crack a window, Sawyer. Want to choke to death on the tarmac?_

When Marduk gunrunners ambushed her and a U.P. patrol in Shin-Okayama.

_Keep your damned head down. You want to be a hero without a head?_

Alex’s voice speaking with Maggie’s cadence. Her swagger. 

It started after Alex had moved out. Maggie got the flu and collapsed in the bathroom, puking all over the front of her pajamas. She’d looked up, her hands in that puddle of wine-tinged vomit, to see a figure hovering over her, haloed by shafts of sharp morning light.

Alex. 

She’d reached down as if to touch her, her smile gentle and indulgent. 

_Clean yourself up, Mags._ _Fever’s broken and there’s lemonade in the fridge._

Maggie clapped a sticky hand on the edge of the sink and pulled herself up, found nothing but air and the scent of cassis shampoo. 

No lemonade either. 

The medbay door flies open as if it’s been lonely.

Maggie pushes the boomseat aside and peels off her clothes, smoke-stained and papery with dried sweat. 

_Stay sharp._

_Breathe._

_Retrace Deuvim’s steps._

A drone sweep of the Petal exterior shows that the high-gain antenna blew long before Central Hub. Portside faced opposite the explosion, and the damage was localized, deliberate. The low-gain is on the opposite side and bent out of position; its electronics box shorted out but intact. Low-gains are backups, their signals weak but still capable of far distances if there's tech to pick them up. Judging from where Deuvim grabbed her, she’d been seeing to the latter. Had she noticed something wrong and gone out herself? If the comms had been down, she wouldn't have had a choice. It would have looked like pirates. They went for the comms first, but this part of the outer colonies isn't exactly teeming with them, and there was nothing on board worth taking. Kyrenium's shipped on separate routes whose comms are heavily encrypted.

Her ribs heave as she tugs her shirt over her head. She winces and presses her chin to her chest, sees the line of bruises across her stomach. Nothing internal. 

She hopes. 

She steps under the nozzle, closing her eyes as a cloud of disinfectant pools around her. The scent is cool and medicinal, a dose of already unfamiliar pleasure. She should take a paper gown from the compartment, but fuck it. She’ll be _that_ woman, naked and imperiled on a ship.

_Enjoy the view, Harbor._

The medbay flickers to life as she enters the main chamber, a 20th-century hospital drama played out in whirs and chitters and blinking monitors.

“How are you suffering?” A listless synthetic voice. Just like Father Rivera back home. 

“Well then.” She eyes the pill cabinet. “Right leg punctured by some runaway piping. Likely PTSD. Fucked.”

The sound of her voice surprises her. It’s raw but doesn’t quite have its old range.

“Step inside the perimeter, please.”

Maggie enters a ring of light and a memory flashes through her. Kit’s Retro Arcade near the Greyhound station. She’s Playing _Dance Dance Revolution_ with Eliza Wilkey. Eliza slips her hands around Maggie’s waist. She doesn’t let go even after the song is over. Even as Maggie struggles, fingers trembling, to jam more quarters into the slot.

“Close your eyes.” 

An infrared pulse washes the room. She lifts her arms like a perp as it takes in the damage, measuring her heart rate, her breathing, the depth of her wounds. The pulse subsides and she feels herself relax, opens her eyes to see the surgery carrel slide open, a sarcophagus replete with blue light and a padded sleep space.

Medbay wants to operate.

_No. Fucking no._

“Diagnosis,” Maggie says. 

“Wound requires suturing. Possible concussion.”

“Possible.”

“Further examination required. Please prepare for surgery.”

“Internal bleeding?”

“Negative.”

She swallows, dips her head to take in a gas tube, and the twisted protrusions of instruments. She doesn’t like cramped spaces. She’s not phobic, but four hours packed inside the space elevator at Hedley’s Lift nearly did her in. And, if Harbor’s comms are trashed, there’s no guarantee medbay won't have its own problems.

“How bad?” she says again.

“Anesthetic required. You may choose from mint, key lime, or flavorless.”

“I’ll take care of it myself,” Maggie says.

“Not advisable.”

“I don’t care.” There must be an edge to her voice, for the carrel snaps shut like the mouth of someone slapped.

She limps over to the medicine compartment, finds a First Aid kit and a bottle of Vicocet. She whistles for the boomseat, watches as it floats to her like an eager pet. She feels a faint surge of nausea as it wobbles under her weight. 

“Walk me through this,” she says.

“Not advisable without a medical pro—”

“Walk me through this!”

“Further disinfection and a booster advised.”

“Now you’re talking.” She takes a bottle of Iodine from the kit. “Will this do?”

There’s no response. She takes the silence as approval and pops it open with her teeth. It burns as she pours it over the wound, dark liquid mingling with a fresh trickle of blood. Hands shaking, she opens the vial, shakes out the recommended dose then decides to take half. She pops one without water and it sinks like an agate in her throat.

She takes out the suturing gun, holds it up, and lets the medbay scanner adjust the settings. The wound is deeper than she thought, but it’s safer this way. She can’t surrender herself to the care of the ship, not until the beacon's up and running, not until she’s certain nothing else has been tampered with. She sucks in a breath, positions it where the red light shows her above the wound. This is going to hurt, but pain is what's keeping her alive. 

#

She doesn't know what happened after the bar. Only that she'd headed for her quarters Petal 4. If she'd made another choice, she wouldn't be staying here. She shouldn't still be alive.

Gabrielle Vecher, Haxen's on-site Executive, offered her a Grande Class suite for the price of her U.P. compensated fare. A suite with a view of the ship. Michelin starred meal plans and bottles of Mardusti brandy.

“It’s the least I can do for Axel’s memory,” he said. 

Months in a capsule hotel, washing the grit from her pores on LK-427 had almost been enough to persuade her, and Vecher's office was a kind of soft intimidation with its the paper books smelling of fresh pulp, the Aritayaki teacups in which Rudy, his Gemel, served them sencha on a lacquered hover tray. He was a ringer for his maker, but younger and not as fleshed out--hard when you were a trick of the light. Most Gemels resembled their users, but some came out as children and for a few unfortunates, their mothers along with speedily processed divorce papers. 

Narcissus and Echo in the same package, Maggie thought. The ego.

“I’m not allowed to accept perks,” she said. "Otherwise, maybe." She took a sip of tea, enjoying the earthy scent of a long-ago summer.

Alex took her to Japan at the end of their first year together; treated her to a Hakone onsen with a private open-air bath and a view of the stars.

It was early July and the cicadas were humming. Maggie asked if they were a downed powerline. Alex laughed at her for days. They’d spent that night taking dips between sex, gazing up at a milky way that seemed to meld with the steam rising from the water. On their third soak, Alex leaned back and stretched her legs in the water. She pointed up to a pair of stars.

“There they are."

“What?”

“Orihime and Hikoboshi. Vega and Altair. She’s a weaver princess. And he’s a shepherd. Lovers who can only meet once a year.” She took a sip from her beer, already lukewarm from the heat. “That story used to make me sad.” 

Her voice broke, but only slightly, and Maggie felt a sudden protectiveness. For all her resilience, Alex had a childlike side that made Maggie love her even more. It shouldn't have, but it did. She traced her fingers up her leg, smooth and warm as the water rippled gently around them. “That's a nice story, Danvers. Why the long face?" 

“I was a kid.” Alex smiled and nestled into her. “Thought it was awful that two people who loved each other that much had to be separated for so long. It wasn't fair.”

“So that whole legend thing didn’t click?” Maggie said. She leaned in and kissed Alex’s ear and Alex hummed, ran her fingers along her collarbone, down between her breasts.

“Oh, stories hurt," she said. "They hurt the most sometimes." She kissed her. “My Dad kept trying. 'It's a myth, Alex. That's how they memorized the constellations.' But my Mom took a more practical approach."

"And what was that?" 

"She said 'Alex, Sweetie, they’re stars. They live for eons. For them, a year isn’t even a week. That helped. A little."

Maggie chuckled and moved to kiss her again, but Alex pulled back, her eyes suddenly fierce with emotion. “I feel that way...with you.”

Maggie cocked her head. "That a year is a week?" 

"That any time I spend away from you is too long.”

They’d stumbled out of the water and over the wet stones, their feet leaving damp marks in the tatami as they made their way back to the futon. They made so many promises that night. Like stars, they were impossible to count.

"Can I top off your cup, Inspector?"

Maggie caught Rudy staring at her, his eyes narrowed as if privy to her memory. She gave him a hard glare in return. Rudy smiled.

_Prick._

“Thanks for the offer," she said, turning her attention back the Vecher. "If the quarters are good enough for the miners, they're good enough for me.”

Vecher nodded pleasantly, as if he’d expected that response. “Understood. And rest assured. Haxen is providing full pensions to all the families.”

Maggie finished off her tea. “That was already part of their contract, wasn’t it?”

“Not if Axel had had his way," Vecher said. "Although you did not hear that from me.”

He was fiddling with a paperweight on his desk. Its surface was smooth and metallic but it absorbed rather than reflected the light. It had an odd shape, rounded edges around a sharp ‘V’ that after looking long enough revealed itself as empty air. A more complicated version of a Kanizsa triangle. Maggie liked optical illusions. They were reminders to shift her perspective. Vecher noticed her staring and placed it back down on the table. “Rudy will see you out. If there’s anything you need while you’re still in reach, don’t hesitate to contact me. We are grateful for everything you’ve done here.”

“Thanks for the offer,” Maggie said. She placed the teacup down on the tray and stood, turned to see Rudy’s smiling, flickering form as he remote activated the door. As she left, she noted they seemed eager to see her go.

Not a surprise. That was never a surprise. 

Only now, it feels like a warning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Eliza story is taken from a real conversation overheard during Tanabata last year. I've been dying to use it ever since.


	4. Slow Feed

_So what are you now? Fifty?_

Laughter. 

Maggie jerks awake, her muscles stiff from a long sleep. She’s taken over a suite, after all, helped herself to a 30 credit vodka from the mini-bar to wash down that second pain killer. She’s not sure she isn’t dreaming. Or drunk.

Voices. 

Human voices. 

Alive and maybe even happy. 

_Blue velvet frosting. Sorry to eat it in front of you._

_It’s a cold world, buddy._

She yanks off the blanket and swings her legs over the side of the bed. Music seeps under the door, raucous and full of cheer. 

_Estas son las mañanitas  
que cantaba el rey …_

A birthday. Someone else’s. Her parents used to sing this to her. Sang it to her every year until she was fourteen. 

Drab English version after that. And not until she was in college. Her girlfriend surprised her with a cupcake and tickets to the basketball game.

Maggie’s aunt Luisa, bless her, was too busy for much fuss over birthdays. She honored her with practical, well-considered gifts. A leather day planner. A watch. The tuition fees she needed for summer programs. 

_Hoy por ser día de tu santo…_

To hear this now feels like some great cosmic joke. But it’s real. That matters. 

_  
te las cantamos aquí._

She stands, tests her weight on her leg. It smarts, but not like yesterday. She keeps the boomseat at her side as she stumbles into the main room.

“H-hey,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Hey!”

Clapping. More laughter. 

She opens the door and rounds the corner, sees the images on the monitor. A sunlit backyard stretches out in front of her, a gate to warmth and comfort. The lopsided grin of a woman looms into view as she holds her toddler close to the camera. His face is sticky with blue frosting. 

_Wave to Daddy. There you go. Wave to Daddy._

The woman steps away. Is replaced by a pair of beefy guys, brothers it looks like. They whistle tunes into their half-empty beer bottles. 

“Hey,” she says. This time with less conviction. She's forcing herself not to look at the time stamp. To maintain that intimacy for just a few more seconds. 

The woman breaks it for her. 

_We planned this early for you, baby_ , she says, holding up her piece of cake. _Wanted to make sure this reached you in time. We love you._ She blows a kiss at the screen. _Happy Birthday, mi amor!_

A delayed feed. 

A delayed fucking feed.

The slow feed takes 53 minutes to Jupiter. 19 hours to the edge of the solar system; here, even splurging on bounce assists, it’s a good six months to reach Petal 4 from Earth. 

Probably what they could afford. 

Time equals money equals a mess out here. And communication equals disaster. She knows all the stories. Of lovers accepting months old proposals only to get a Dear J letter hand-delivered via an FTL passenger the next day. More money pays for more bounce assists, or if you’re a trillionaire, you might bribe your way into the qubit feed, saved for emergencies or catastrophic headlines. People got news about their hometowns being wiped out, only to have that followed up by months and months of messages from their loved ones, cheerfully updating them on their lives, oblivious to the loss ahead. There’s a name for these things: reality spoilers. The best you can hope for is to not know any of the characters. 

But Maggie keeps watching, even chuckles a little as they crack jokes and fight over a last slice of cake. It’s soothing. This illusion of company. An illusion for them too.

The pulse beacon didn’t fire. 

They still don’t know. 

She stops herself there. Feelings are dangerous and nostalgia's a fucking siren song.

The important thing is that the low-gain antenna is still functioning. At least picking up signals. She whispers a prayer of thanks to Deuvim, promising her a proper burial when this thing is over. For now, she’s moved the body down to the deep freeze. You don’t throw away evidence.

There should be noise from LK-427. The delay is only three hours. 

“Harbor," she says. "Patch through incoming. Any word from Traffic?” 

Calling it traffic in a place this remote is akin to calling a lonely game of handball the World Cup. On LK, Traffic is a rusted, wind-battered deep space antenna, helmed by a few dried-up recluses named Barry and Eve. 

Married couple. Hated each other, so they came out to the colonies to work out their issues. They’re still together, so there’s that. 

“Nothing incoming.”

Petal 4 should have heard from them by now. Even without the beacons, they’d have noticed the radio silence. A beacon would mean at least a rescue attempt. But without it, they’d have no way to track her location. 

Another long-wait communique bleeps in from Earth. Personal.

The timing is about right. There’ll be a flood of these: family, friends, lovers. Some of the senders all too aware that their audience is captive. 

Not any longer. 

The low-gain is working. She can fix it, she hopes. But like Deuvim, she’ll have to go outside.

#  
LK's surface is a slur of mud and stone, the winds strong enough to send a person flying if not for the harder gravity. Maggie has that at least that part to thank. The months on that rock have strengthened her, maybe even shortened her recovery. 

She runs over the details of the case. Severn’s quick confession. The motive.

57 people dead. 

The tunnel was a fast track to a new vein of Kyrenium. A motherlode set to push interstellar travel ahead a few centuries. Zofia rushed it. A decision made under pressure, not only from Haxen, but a million other interests and developments. Severn got the tunnel blueprints from a hacker named Pitt. He refused to give his real name.

“A muckraker,” he told her. “Literally.” He laughed at his own joke. 

A memory pushes up from nowhere. Almost invasive. 

She’s heading back from the Stopper, a small casino at the edge of Tarquin Square. The food is vegetarian and passable, and she likes to end the ten-day week with a couple of too sweet shochu concoctions and the owner’s famous root goulash. 

She’s exhausted. Wants nothing more than a hot shower and the comfort of her capsule hotel, but the rain is lashing out and she’s soaked before she’s halfway down the walkway. 

She hits a puddle, more like a river. LK’s streets are mostly unpaved as the colony's reliant on transport hovers. The jagged outline of shanties and concrete ripples in the murky reflection until a shadow falls over the remaining light, blocking them out.

Maggie whips around, blinking through the grit in her eyes. He's hard to make out in this mess, even up close. A cloaked figure in a clerical collar. Not a surprise. Frontier preacher has always been the last resort of a shitheel, but there's something off about this one. His eyes are...empty. None of the fake zeal of a charlatan or the real fire of the newly converted. She's not the type to get rattled, but she finds herself stepping back, off the walkway and into the water. The cold rises and seeps over the tops of her boots.

He takes a step forward and grabs her by the wrist, pulls her from the current like she’s paper. Not a word of concern. No smile although she's certain she wouldn't want to see that. She stands there, jaw working, trying to sputter out a ‘thank you.’ But the man just stares through her as if she wasn't even there to begin with. He shoves her aside and makes his way through the water, and she swears, although it might be the rain, that it doesn't seem to touch him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is coming out in short bursts. More of the mystery revealed in a few days. And Alex.


	5. All You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex never got Maggie’s dreams.
> 
> “Every night, I get maniacs chasing me or giant flesh-eating poppies,” she said. “How many times have I fallen off the top of a skyscraper? And you? You dream about the firing range or the lineup. You dream about doing paperwork.”
> 
> “My REM cycle doesn’t suffer bullshit,” Maggie told her.

_Then it’s one foot, then the other as you step out on the road…_

_And it’s how long and how far and how many times..._ Jane Siberry

_I still got love for you_

_Your braids like a pattern_ _Love you to the Moon and to Saturn..._ _You Know Who_

_So, Ma. I graduated. How much do I get?_

_Waldo. Our—your dog—just chewed up the car seat. I am not paying for this, Rick._

_Omae no okaasan wa choooo uruseina! Hayaku kaete kure._

Maggie chuckles as she works on the circuit box. She’s diverted all incoming to the workshop in case a dispatch from LK Traffic gets through, butthere’s alsoa comfort in these messages, in the endearments, and the excruciatingly long updates on taxes or home repairs. She’s performing a strange memorial service. At least they haven’t reached a ghost, she tells herself. And sometimes, as she tightens a bolt and solders another wire, she catches herself muttering a ‘congratulations’ or a ‘back at you’ in response. 

_Be safe, Hannah! Muwaaah!_

They give her a goal. To survive. To make it home and hear a real voice, to feel the real sun on her face. 

She’ll fix the low-gain first, manually realign the antenna and then move on to the high-gain because that’s what she can manage, but she’s thinking about the pulse beacon. How if she gets that working, she can ping through instantly to Para. Fat chance LK will divert a Kyrenium shipment when it can slog her back over weeks on a freightpod, but Para could send an FTL capable ship, maybe even beat LK before they drag her down to that muddy surface. There’s another reason: She doubts Vecher will be happy to see her alive.

The pulse beacon is housed in a fist-sized chamber in Petal’s core and was untouched by the explosion. Pulses are ostensibly malware proof, running on their own quantum blockchains, and the surveillance feeds show no signs of a security breach. 

She’s going over the airlock sequence in her head again when another message flickers on the monitor. Not a spouse or a drunken friend; this guy’s in a lab. Loosened tie and sweater vest, tufts of gray at his temples. 

“Hello, Shen.” 

He looks unpleasant, Maggie thinks. Like the kind of asshole who snipes at people for using ‘literally’ the wrong way, but he seems excited about something. Even a little afraid.

“I got the data packet you sent me. I was a bit surprised, and so I didn’t have time to look at it until a few weeks ago, but Shen, wow…”

There’s a mix of awe and back-peddling condescension in his tone. Maggie’s familiar with this; she’s heard it in the voices of acquaintances, people who knew her when she was subletting a sofa and working her way through school. Years later, they’d run into her on the street or in the station, eye her badge and instantly recalibrate their demeanor.

“Those pictures of the tunnel walls aren’t just primitive cave scratchings as you put it. They’re formulas.”

He nods back at a blackboard, so streaked with white it could play a coffee table in a rock star biopic. Numbers and symbols take up every inch of space, except one.

A shape. Three dimensional, complex enough to be baroque. Maggie leans forward, but the asshole blocks it again as if teasing his recipient. 

“I can’t explain. It’s far too valuable, but I’m very much hoping you’ve got more where this came from.” He steps up closer to the camera, his voice a whisper. “This is late in coming, I realize, but I would also advise you to keep it secret. Tell no one else. This could be big, sport. Very big.” Then as an afterthought. “For both of us. I await your next dispatch.”

“Harbor, roll back,” she says. “Right there. Stop.”

The monitor freezes on the clearest shot of the board. “Enhance by ten.”

She stares at the numbers but gets nothing. If Alex was here, she could work through those proofs in minutes, explain their significance or lack of, but that shape... It’s familiar. 

“Twenty.” She’s dabs at her brow with a torn-up shirt. Squints harder at the screen. Goddamned heat. She’s adjusted the temperature three times already. She should be freezing. And she probably should ignore this. She’s got better things to do. But as the image looms closer, becoming granular in its expansion, it becomes all-too-familiar. That thing she saw on Vecher’s desk, the spheres and sharp angles, bordered by tricks of the eye that burn like floaters on her vision. It’s the same shape. Or a version of it.

Had Shen sent that message out in secret? She isn’t even sure that the tunnels this guy refers to were _those_ tunnels, but Vecher’s tone and Rudy’s smug expression slide a bit more into place.

Something was, _is_ off. In the ease with which she closed the case, in Severn’s eager confession. Had Oscar’s death derailed her attention? Set her off somehow? She takes a cup of water from the dispensary and sips. It almost hurts to swallow, and she’s sweating despite the chill in the room. She dashes the liquid into her palm and dabs at her face, pours the rest over the back of her neck. It’s tepid, but the air streaming from the vents adds a boost and she closes her eyes in relief. 

_You’re hot._

“Yeah?” she says. “The EVA’s got an excellent cooling system. Don’t put me off this, Danvers.”

She catches herself. That response was a little too visceral. 

“Harbor, give me everything you have about the recipient.”

“Shen Vinkonour. 35. Born in East Lansing, Michigan to Patricia Vinkonour—” 

“Not here. Send the packet to my quarters,” she says. 

Some bedtime reading for when she’s back inside.

She dabs at her forehead again and checks her handiwork, running the scanner over the electronics box, watching as each point clears with an electronic chitter. 

First things first. Time to suit up. 

#

Deuvim did this on the quick. Barely waited for the suit to pressurize. But Deuvim had experience, and despite having gone through the steps a hundred times, Maggie has never done a walk. What she lacks in familiarity, however, she makes up for in being methodical.

It used to drive Alex a crazy. She would brush off her own dogged adherence to procedure, waiting, her shoulder a doorstop, as Maggie sat on a footstool and carefully laced up her boots. 

_It’s a day hike. That is, if we get there during the day._

“Going as fast as I can, Danvers.”

_And you picked those boots._

“I wanted to piss you off.”

_You look too good for that._

She tests her leg, the memory alloy’s constricting, but space walks are all arms and grips, and legs are just along for the ride. She lowers the HUT, slipping in her arms and securing it to the LTA. She tests the cooling tubes and checks the lights, rechecks the locks on the outer gloves. 

“Do I now?” 

There’s no answer as she steps outside. Just a vacuum and a silence broken by the rhythm of her heart. 

She’s not afraid. Not really. But she’s heard the stories. How it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the vastness; how walkers get trapped between eternity and their own heads long enough to make a mistake. She’d deny it, but a part of her knows how much the isolation is wearing at her, making her vulnerable. 

Alex has walked dozens of times for the U.P.

 _Like climbing a ladder_. _Just don’t look up or down or sideways and you’ll be fine._

Fine.

Maggie keeps her eyes on the hull, on the pitons crisscrossing Petal’s shell-like spines on some ancient creature. She focuses on her breath, on the chitter of the bio monitor.

Resting heartrate—110 and climbing.

Temperature 40.

She reaches the low-gain in under twenty minutes and the old circuit box snaps easily from its alcove. She tosses it into the black behind her, a summer kid hurling a pop bottle into the sea. The replacement box snaps easily into place and the antenna is pliant. She reorients it, replacing the strut and a sheath of burnt reflector membrane blocking the signal. She’ll have to activate the transmitter from inside to know for certain, but this feels like progress, like she’s one step closer to a human voice. 

She’s on her way back when it happens. 

Her leg, the one she’s told herself doesn’t matter, cricks and stiffens. She tries to bend a knee and pain sears through her body. She doubles over, releasing another spasm. One hand slips from the piton as her feet lose purchase and her body tilts outward from the hull. She’s hanging by one hand, her suit puffed up and stiff like that flag in the moon landing photo.

“Heart rate rising. Oxygen reserves low. Immediate return advised.”

“Happy to.”

She grabs hold and pulls herself back to the hull, but there’s too much force and as her feet connect, one boot catches on a piton running up from the docking hub. If her muscles weren’t cramping up, she could bend at the knee, slip her foot easily from the rung. But the memory alloy has cut off her circulation, and her leg is as taut and heavy as a support beam. She strains, hoping to force it out, but a tearing sound, unambiguous, gives her pause.

“Leak. Immediate return to ship advised.”

“How much time.”

“Depressurization within fifteen minutes.”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Give it a minute. Relax. Even the worst cramps go away.”

This one doesn’t. 

_Fuck._

She should have let medbay put her under, should have waited until she’d healed up completely. She shakes off the thought. No use for that. 

“Slow your breathing, Sawyer. Think.”

_What? You’re not going to shoot your way out of this?_

“Alex.” 

_I never said never, Sawyer. I just said only when necessary._

She reaches for the sidearm in her utility belt. Not a weapon, but a heat beam used for welding. If she aims right, she might cut through the metal and sever the piton. Or blow an even bigger hole in her suit.

She dips her head, as far as the suit will let her, and trains the scope on the trap. She can’t see the beam. Flames don’t taper in microgravity and there’s no oxygen to feed them, but a blue glow winks at her from below, and she lets out a cry as the rung snaps and severs. 

A sob rolls through her as she pulls herself free, climbing hand over hand back to the hatch, a spooked kid tripping on a darkened stairway. 

She only looks once inside, taking in the immensity as the void vanishes behind the hatch. There’s no majesty in what she sees, just more loneliness and loss. A lifetime supply for the whole fucking universe. She’s drenched in sweat, her arms heavy as she removes her helmet. It clatters to the tile as she disconnects the cooling system and slips out of the LTV. The HUT is unbearably heavy in the sudden gravity. She stumbles forward, tries to lift her arms. 

“Could really use an assist, Harbor.” 

The drone flits overhead and lifts the armored shell from her body like it’s picking up a drink tray. She reels at the sudden lightness of her body, her vision spinning as she collapses against the walls of the airlock. She can’t feel her leg and she reaches down, tears hopelessly at the alloy.

“How am I doing?” She whistles at the boomseat. “C’mere.” 

“Immediate medical assist required.”

“Yeah? Well, what are you waiting for then, Danvers?”

She doesn’t see the drone hovering above her, doesn’t feel it as it lifts her up, so gently for a machine. She dangles there, a cat hanging over a bathtub, until the boomseat slides beneath her and whisks her to the medbay. 

#

Alex never got Maggie’s dreams.

“Every night, I get maniacs chasing me or giant flesh-eating poppies,” she said. “How many times have I fallen off the top of a skyscraper and you? You dream about the firing range or the lineup. You dream about doing paperwork.”

“My REM cycle doesn’t suffer bullshit,” Maggie told her.

This one is the same. She goes over the airlock procedure, dons and removes the suit. She’s removing a burnt out converter in the circuit box when she hears it.

“Hello, Mags.”

She stops. Leans forward against the worktable, her back tense. That’s just some bullshit. Get back to—

“Didn’t you ask me? To drop a line through the ether?”

Maggie’s jaw sets. She feels a chill run through her, that unpleasant sensation of a hand on the back of her neck. Not squeezing, but teasing her. Caressing. She forces herself to face it.

The monitor.

Alex is on that screen. Her hair is longer, the way it was when they first met. She brushes it back from her eyes. 

“I know,” she says. “I can’t believe this either. But I’ve got to say, it feels… good. And I hope you are. Good.” Her gaze flicks down to her hands, now folded in her lap, calm posturing negated by the tiny movements of her fingers. She eyes the camera again, poised and serious, but also as if a weight’s fallen from her shoulders.

“Kelly served me the divorce papers today.” 

Maggie’s chest contracts. She feels legitimately bad, even as a small vein of hope opens inside her. Alex holds up her hand as if she knows exactly how Maggie will react. Six or seven or eight months later, depending on the feed. Has this window of intimacy already closed? It’s more than enough time. Wholly possible that she’s found someone else. 

“I don’t want you to worry. It was… amicable. We just don’t fit.” Alex pushes out a breath, nods a little as if giving herself a quiet pep talk. “Boy, we _really_ don’t fit. But that’s not—or that’s not what I’m trying to tell you.” She looks up at the screen and her voice cracks slightly. “Mags. Maggie. You’re in danger.”

_Well, no shit._

She coughs herself awake, tugging against her restraints as a cloud of disinfectant curdles around her. The carrell slides open, leaving her exposed to the glaring lights of the medbay. Her sight’s blurry, but the pain has subsided and the fever’s gone. She pulls at the restraints, now lifting easily at the pressure, and presses a hand to her forehead. A nest of nodes still cling to her skin and she plucks one away, gets no protest from medbay, and yanks off the others. All better now? Is it over?

She pushes herself up and tugs off the paper-thin blanket. Her leg is swathed in a medbrace and a substantial bruise purples the surrounding skin. A digital read gives her a countdown of 72-hours until recovery. Until then, she’ll need the boomseat or a crutch to get around.

“Harbor, how long have I been under?”

“Four days, eleven hours and twenty-eight minutes.”

The voice has a faintly synthetic timbre, but it's still very close to human. Much closer than Harbor’s.

She shifts, and with some effort, swings her legs over the edge of bed. She starts, one hand squeezing the blanket. A blurry figure in doctor’s whites regards her from across the room.

“Who...”

All bioform physicians perished in Central Hub.

Maggie presses her palms to her eyes, as if trying to push out the image. She looks again, and the shadow straightens and approaches the sarcophagus. There’s a rustle of fabric—again synthetic—but no accompanying footfall. 

“Who the fuck are you?”

She snaps for the boomseat, ready to make a run for it, as her senses confirm that perfect posture, the cut features that soften as they come into focus. 

And those eyes. 

Soft and brown and brimming with warmth. 

_Oh god._

Alex Danvers stops and crouches before her; her expression quizzical and faintly amused. She lifts her hand to Maggie’s forehead as if to brush back her hair, and Maggie leans in, drawn to the promise of a touch that doesn’t come.

“Did I not… make it?” she asks.

“Shhh…” Alex smiles. Understanding. Gentle. A glow emanates from her palms as if she’s granting a benediction. She skims Maggie’s neck above the carotid artery and Maggie feels her pulse thrum as she takes in the pinstriped pattern beneath the white coat. _That_ shirt. She’d seen it when she strolled into the station for the first time. That was a year before they met. She’d caught her eye even then.

But this is not Alex. This is—

Not Alex removes her hands. Satisfied. “You made it,” she says as if she’s been worried herself. “You’re very much alive.”

She smiles then, evincing that familiar mix of warmth and humor so well that Maggie’s heart nearly bursts. “The drugs should wear off about now. How do you feel?”

Maggie lets out a laugh. “How are you _here_?”

Alex Not Alex straightens. She takes in a breath — a simulation, Maggie reminds herself—and looks away, her eyes distant in that same way Alex’s grew distant when she had to explain something difficult. After a long moment, she lets that ghost breath out and faces her, her head tilted slightly, the way Maggie’s head tilts slightly whenever she’s skeptical or curious. 

“You’re a Gemel,” Maggie whispers.

Not Alex nods. 

“Of _her_.”

She laughs. It’s close enough to genuine to be infuriating. 

“She’s not on the ship as far as I know.”

“Who then?”

Not Alex lifts an eyebrow, seemingly baffled by Maggie’s confusion. “I’m your emergency intervention,” she says. “I’m all you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a week late. I have been in a Zoom hole. The center cannot hold. But it turns out the delay was fortuitous, at least as far as mood. Taylor Swift's sudden gift has (I hope) helped it along. Thanks for reading.


	6. The Scent of Betrayal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not Alex takes a step back, giving her room to process the shock. Gait loose, she walks over to the examination table and hoists herself up, or rather hovers in a sitting position. It’s uncanny the way she takes up space, ethereal yet giving off a convincing kind of solidity. She sits with her legs sprawled, one foot resting atop a chair, the way Maggie might sit if her own leg wasn’t swaddled in a brace.
> 
> “You don’t look like me,” Maggie says. 
> 
> A smile tugs at her lips. “We can’t all be perfect.”
> 
> ~  
> This was a killer. It's the most unpantsed thing I've written, and yet the discoveries keep on coming. Thanks for putting up with the side trips and the typos.  
> TW in the endnotes.

“I’m all you.”

Maggie doesn’t speak. She calculates. There’s still a chance this isn’t real. That she’s dreaming her life away in that coffin because if it is, then Harbor’s systems are running a lot less smoothly than she thought. She’s in terrible shape, sure. But imprisoning her with the doppelganger of her ex is as far from a sane recovery as you can get.

Not Alex takes a step back, giving her room to process the shock. Gait loose, she walks over to the examination table and hoists herself up, or rather hovers in a sitting position. It’s uncanny the way she takes up space, ethereal yet giving off a convincing kind of solidity. She sits with her legs sprawled, one foot resting atop a chair, the way Maggie might sit if her own leg wasn’t swaddled in a brace.

“You don’t look like me,” Maggie says. 

A smile tugs at her lips. “We can’t all be perfect.”

“Why are you here?”

“Your solitude was becoming a danger. To you and to Harbor.”

“Well…” Maggie grabs the boomseat, swings it around to align with the bed. She pushes herself up, arms sore against her weight. “Harbor’s not the best conversationalist.”

“Oh, believe me. I know.” Not Alex or Alex—she’s giving up already—folds her arms, watching not incautiously as Maggie lifts herself into the seat. Gemels can merge with tech. They can commune easily with onboard systems, provided they’re not locked out. She's likely trading info with Harbor as they speak. The seat wobbles, nearly sending her ass first to the floor. 

“Could have asked the drone for help,” Alex says.

“I like to do things myself.”

“I know you do.”

“Do you?” They lock eyes, but Maggie’s a champ at emotional chicken, and she thinks she sees Alex flinch, just as she did on the tarmac all those years ago. Is it just a projection? An overlap of memory and wish-fulfillment?

Alex slips off the table and strides toward her, one hand slicing the air as she recites a litany of Maggie’s afflictions. “That leg was borderline gangrenous. A little more time and you would have lost it. You were severely dehydrated, suffering from malnutrition and a host of secondary infections and—” 

Sheer Alex med speak, but Maggie’s missed it. God, she’s missed it. She’s always listened to her gut when it comes to others, but she’s not so good when it comes to herself. But Alex was different. Maggie might put on a face, let her lower lip jut out as she turned away to sulk, but she’d always turn back. Is this the reason? The justification for recreating the woman who’d patched up her body before she tore apart her heart?

“… not to mention, you were spacewalking with a severely high fever. I still don’t know how you managed that. It’s beyond foolhardy.”

“Someone had to do it.” Not her best comeback, but it’s hard to be witty when you’re talking to a ghost.“So what now? You hover around me while I eat my vegetables?”

Alex ignores the crack. “I’ve already sent an order to the mess. You’ve been eating nothing but half-frozen packets of somen and calorie bars, Sawyer. Don’t know what you were thinking there either.”

“I need to test the transmitter first,” she says. 

Alex tilts her head. She shoots her a look of beleaguered tolerance, like Maggie’s some uppity kid and she’s ready for all her tricks.

“Food first. Get dressed.”

#

The drone serves up a spread in the pilot’s mess: Powdered eggs and greens that look surprisingly fresh. Even the double-toasted bagel has the right consistency, although the flavor’s more cardboard than poppy seed. Alex has traded the doctor’s whites for a pair of dark jeans and a loose denim shirt, maybe to put her at ease. Gemel can switch wardrobes, but not much else beyond aging up or down. A security precaution locked in by Elias, and one often used in arguments for their rights. A gemel is an individual: one passbook, one U.P. identification number. Yet, they’re less free to alter themselves than flesh and blood human beings. A needless and cruel form of hobbling, Maggie thinks: the assignation of an identity at inception to beings even more capable of growth. 

“Eat all of it. Slowly,” Alex tells her, and Maggie does, not because she feels hungry but because she needs to focus on something other than the presence sitting across from her. She shovels in another bite and chews for what seems like an eternity. The drugs are still in her system, fogging her senses and dulling her taste buds. She reaches for a bottle of Sriracha sauce.

“That a good idea?” Alex says. 

Maggie ignores her and squeezes a trail of red over the eggs. She takes a bite, relieved to feel the burn on her tongue.

“I almost died,” she says. “Indulge me.” She pours a tall glass of water and downs it.

“This is new for you.”

“How so?” Maggie pours another glass. Alex wasn’t kidding about the dehydration.

“You were always the ascetic,” Alex says, a note of playfulness in her voice. “No butter, no sugar or milk in your coffee.”

The note of familiarity throws her, sends the water down the wrong passage. Maggie pitches forward coughing, pressing a napkin to her lips to keep from spitting all over her front. 

“You okay?”

“Yes." She lets herself breathe for a moment. "Fucking Christ.” 

“Like I said,” Alex quips. “Take it slowly.”

“Stop it.” Maggie’s hand shoots up, smacking the pitcher. She rights it before it falls, but some of the water slops over the edge, creating a thin pool on the table’s surface. Maggie stares into it, sees herself and this other Alex staring back at her. “I can’t…” She grabs a towel and dabs furiously at the water. “I can’t have this argument with you.”

“Argument?” 

“The food. The banter. _This_ argument.” She tosses the cloth down and faces her remaining ghost. “Not with _you_.”

Alex blinks, still not comprehending, but then her gaze sharpens and Maggie swears she can see that long string of mornings, those routines of chiding and sleepy flirtation flickering like a reel behind her eyes. 

“I’m being too familiar,” she says, and a vague astonishment creeps over her face.

“I suppose that’s the point,” Maggie says. 

Real Alex had this side to her. That tough exterior was honed from childhood, a means to hide a lonely girl who was too open, who scared others off in so many awkward attempts to connect.

How much? Maggie wonders. How much of this thing is what she remembers of Alex? And how much can be attributed to her own inability to disclose what hurts?

_Thing._

She feels a stab of guilt at the word. Whatever she is, this Alex is not a thing. Maggie applauded the Mihara ruling. She’s always been the first to rebuke others for using the same dehumanizing—no, that isn’t the right word, but it _is_ the right word—language. And yet here she is.

_Thing._

It’s like a tiny piece of her father has been left festering inside her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “This is a lot to take in.”

“It’s understandable,” Alex says. “You love her very much.”

“I…” Maggie’s cheeks go hot. “Sorry doesn’t mean push your luck.”

“Of course,” Alex says. “Got it.”

A silence stretches between them, punctured by the occasional report of clicks and beeps from the monitors, the scrape of Maggie’s fork as she finishes her meal. In a strange show of support, Alex has the drone bring her a cup of tea. She sits quietly, running her hand through the steam, watching it coil through her fingers with an almost childlike fascination. There’s someone else in these movements. Not Alex or herself. She’s more like an infant, exploring and negotiating a new environment.

Alex dips her face into the steam. “It’s lovely.”

“You can smell that?” Maggie asks. 

Alex opens her eyes and thinks for a moment. She's got that hazy affect of someone who's just waking up. 

“Mint Beginnings,” she says. “You’ve still got a box in the back of your cupboard. Well past the sell-by date though.”

“That’s very…specific,” Maggie says. “I’d forgotten about that.”

“My memory works like yours. Partially through scent.”

“Not to be blunt, but you don't have a body. How does that work?”

“Quantum olfaction,” Alex says. “The characteristics of a scent aren’t in its molecular structure but the vibrational spectrum. Each particle is unique and interlocked with discrete experiences.” 

Maggie feels herself smile for the first time. “So some of the nerd came with you.” 

“Should I have called it a card catalog?”

“Same impression,” Maggie says, but this knowledge is a revelation. A gemel has a hyper-accurate memory and can access those memories via smell. Maggie's had those experiences, has time-slipped on a song or a scent, but it's never lasted longer than a second or two. 

She remembers working late at the academy when Ty Payton, another farm belt rookie, spilled a tin of tobacco on the carpet. That fragrance of burnt moss and leather shunted her back into childhood.

Her father’s study. She was six years old and staring at the walnut cigar box on his bookshelf. _From the humidor of Prince Frederick._

It was a gift from Blue Springs’ Mayor, Terl Gifford. Unopened and untouchable. A symbol of a long sought-for acceptance. 

Maggie didn’t know what was in it. She was fascinated by the insignia engraved in the wood, the tiny golden latch that offered up secrets. She’d been sent back only for an instant, but she was there. Her small socked feet planted on Oscar’s ottoman as she reached up, her fingers brushing against the wood. And then she was back. She remembers closing her eyes, breathing through her nose to get it back, but Payton’s tobacco permeated everything, mixing with the odors of carpet cleaner and burnt coffee, drowning the past in the stench of the present.

“So your memory of my memories is better than my memory,” Maggie says. 

Alex twirls a finger in the steam, a conjurer sifting through their history. “That’s a good way to put it.”

“Sounds like an asset in my line of work.” She’s already going there. She can send this Alex back through their memories of LK, pull up the lost details, things she’s missed.

Alex’s eyes narrow. “Not necessarily,” she says. ”It can make it harder to judge which details are important. What you forget counts just as much.”

“Wait until you’re racking your brain trying to remember a crime scene that’s been cleaned up too early,” Maggie says.

“You wouldn’t want this,” Alex says. She taps a finger to her forehead. “The good. The bad. It’s all here, not softened by time and distance.” Her chin quivers then, only slightly, the way Maggie’s does when she’s having a bad moment.

A shudder rolls through her. Elias is a Luthor level bastard. Access to all that memory entails carrying the emotional burden. Someone else’s. Maggie wouldn’t wish this on anyone. She’s worked hard to keep the darkness to herself. Didn’t tell Alex about her parents until the secret threatened to end them. Now she’s saddled someone with all of it. 

“Everything okay?” Alex looks like she can see through her. 

“Yeah,” Maggie says. She glances at the digital readout on her leg brace. A little more than 70 hours to go. “You think I can walk right after this comes off.”

“That depends on you,” Alex says. “You should heal pretty quickly, but I’d take it easy at first.”

Maggie takes another sip of water and snaps for the boomseat. “Better test out that transmitter.”

Alex shifts in her chair. “Why not take it easy for a little longer. You’ve been through a lot.”

“I’ll relax when I get out that distress call. Hell, if the repairs were successful, you and Harbor should have already...”

She stops, feels a knot form in her stomach.

“Why are you putting me off? Did the repairs not work?”

“The antenna’s working,” Alex says. “The transmitter should too. I'm just saying you should wait.” She lifts her chin in a show of defiance, but it's clear that she's uneasy.

“Harbor,” Maggie says. Alex shakes her head. ”Patch through incoming." 

Alex presses her fingers to the table. “I can do that for you,” she says. “I was hoping it could wait a little longer. You’re not in the right state.”

“What the hell do you mean by ‘right state?”

"Just listen." Alex closes her eyes and lets out a long breath. There's a sound of static from somewhere near her center. It breaks into scattered speech.

“Primus, this— Traffic on LK-427.—Update on the passenger ship, Shanti-Ason—umber—ber 41192.” 

That’s not Barry or Eve. The voice, as it grows clearer, is low and gravelly and thick with malice. 

“We’ve narrowed the last jump point outside the Kestra-Gardis system.”

Jump point? The Asona was a slow boat. It only made two hops at Para Junction and Io flipstation. Nowhere near Kestra-Gardis.

“They’re saying it went off course?”

Alex doesn’t answer. She just waits for Maggie to hear the rest. That the ship was hit by pirates. That there was a distress call and a ransom demand right before the Asona dropped comms. Traffic ‘managed to trace’ one of her captors to Silum before it jumped again. The last energy signature was in Kestra-Gardis.

“We’ve notified Para via pulse. They’ll relay it to Earth. Recommend turning search over to the U.P. authorities. We’ll keep comms open, but there’s very little we can do down here.”

Alex opens her eyes and cuts off the feed. She folds her hands, her face drawn with worry. “That's why,” she says. "You needed to regain your strength before...all that."

“This—they’re diverting the search,” Maggie says. "Making sure the U.P. stays away from LK." She feels her heart start to rattle. If she sends out a distress call, LK will be the first to pick it up. Whoever’s done this will have plenty of time to finish the job. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

For the first time, Alex looks angry. “Look at yourself.”

“Don’t gaslight me.”

“Maggie. I’m not just protecting you. I need to protect Harbor.” She gestures at the monitor. “Herein lies the evidence of your _,_ _our_ predicament.”

“I knew something was off,” Maggie says. “I knew I’d rushed that fucking case.” She looks at Alex, barely registering the anger in her expression. “I need you to send through everything from LK. Now. I need to go over it.”

“No.”

“Are you part of this? Are you a trap?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Alex says. “My loyalty to you is built-in, and I don’t have a choice in the matter.” She says this as if it’s something she doesn’t like about herself. Maggie doesn't like it either. When she gets back home—when _they_ get back home, she’ll…she’ll…

“Just slow down,” Alex says. "Your pulse is rising."

Maggie directs the boomseat toward the door. “I need the feeds from LK, all of it. I need to—"Her breath is coming quick, but she can’t seem to get enough air. “It’s so fucking hot."

Alex catches up. She swipes a hand over her forehead. “Your fever's back,” she says. “I should have kept you under longer.” She signals to the drone and Maggie takes a swing at it, but the room is spinning around her now. She doubles over, pukes into her lap just as she feels the jab in her neck, hears the tiny puff of an intradermal syringe. 

“Don’t let Harbor activate the transmitter. Don’t—”

Alex places a hand on her forehead, and Maggie swears she can almost feel it. “I won’t,” Alex says, her voice tinged with a worry that can only be genuine. “Now rest.”

#

She’d pushed the box off the shelf, sent it crashing to the floor, its hinges snapping as the cigars tumbled across the floor like some mini arsenal. 

It wasn’t Oscar who lashed out at her. It was her mother.

“You were going to smoke them, weren’t you?” Elena Rodas grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her so hard, Maggie's limbs shuddered for hours afterward. 

“Are they for those boys at Sanford Hall? Is that where you want to end up?”

Maggie didn’t know who the boys were. She didn’t know Sanford Hall was the juvenile detention center.

Oscar burst into the room, saw Maggie dangling and yanked her from her mother’s grasp. Maggie clung to him, the shock releasing itself in tears.

“She was stealing,” Elena spat. 

Oscar laughed, although the rage was apparent in his voice. “She’s six years old.”

“You want her to go to hell?”

“Leave.”

Elena stalked out, muttering something about the devil’s reach, and Oscar knelt and placed his hands on Maggie’s shoulders. Oscar’s hands were gentle and didn’t hurt.

“Margarita. Why did you do this?”

“Th-there’s a prince on the box,” she said. “I thought there was a treasure.”

Oscar laughed. He plucked a cigar from the floor and held it up to her nose. Maggie scrunched up her face, but she was laughing now too. “Yuck!” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

“You see?” Oscar said. “This is why it’s better to keep the mystery sometimes.”

“But you’re a detective.”

Oscar tossed the cigar into the wastebasket. “I solve mysteries to serve justice,” he said. “But most people are mysteries. They have secrets, some harmless, some unpleasant.” He looked at her as if he was puzzling something out. “It’s best to keep those secrets locked up.”

He said no more on that point. He dumped out the rest of the contents, and together they repaired the box with Elmer’s glue and the tools from his workshop. From then on, Maggie kept it on her desk. It was where she kept her pencils and stickers, the secret notes passed between schoolmates. Written for girls like Eliza Wilkey.

The secret she wouldn't be able to keep. 

#

She awakens in the darkness. She’s in her quarters, the commandeered suite with the mini-bar. She shifts on the mattress, her dream acquiescing to the smooth cold of the sheets. There's someone hovering over her and she bolts up. 

"Shit! 

Alex sits at her bedside, her posture straight, her eyes open and expressionless.

Maggie yanks off the blanket. “Could you not do that?”

“You’re awake," Alex says. "I'm glad." She lifts her hand and raises the lights. Maggie squints and covers her eyes.

“That too. Tone it down a bit.”

“I've been up all night thinking,” Alex says. 

“About getting me all the feeds from LK?" Maggie says. She looks at the brace, 60 hours and counting. She’s been out for ten hours.

“Are you feeling better?”

“I don’t think I should be,” Maggie says. It’s hitting her all over again, the medbay, the gemel, the fact that she’s been deliberately left for dead.

“But you are,” Alex says. She rises from her seat. “Which is good because you were mulling over a problem before you went under.”

“I’ll say,” Maggie says. “Help me up, okay? Could you get the drone?”

“I meant _before_ your surgery,” Alex says. “I meant the problem with pulse beacon.” 

Maggie stops and Alex faces her, her voice thick with excitement. “I think I've figured it out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Awful parents. Hinted at physical abuse.


	7. Too Much Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You sleep?”
> 
> She knows they do, but it’s strange to hear it firsthand. Alex gives her a look like Maggie should know better than to ask something so simple.
> 
> “I’ve only done it once, so I suppose the simple present isn’t accurate. But yes, we sleep. We need it just like you do.”
> 
> “What’s that like?”
> 
> Alex folds her hands, starts teasing her thumbs together. “Oh, you know… counterfactual simulations following decoherence of dissonant superimposed states.”
> 
> Maggie’s heard about all this. That gemel dream activities reveal quantum branching events, depicting fragments from alternate timelines. Massive implications for human dream activity—or so say all the hooey peddlers. 
> 
> “That’s not what I meant.” She snaps a finger at the drone. “Coffee. Black.” Alex shoots her a look of mild disapproval but says nothing. 
> 
> “What did you mean?”
> 
> “I want to know what you dreamed about?”
> 
> “Oh….” Alex tugs at the hem of her shirt and Maggie can swear she’s blushing. “I was… we were arguing.”

She’s kept the photos. Almost a hundred. Snapped in a moment of clumsiness.

They’re in the botanical garden in Sommerville park. Behind them is a wall of oleander, its dark green leaves tossing knives across the sun bright pavement. If she concentrates, Maggie can still smell the faint scent of apricot, feel her hand on the small of Alex’s back, stopping her from backing into that sweet and poisonous bloom.

Alex is in a daze. 

It’s one minute and thirty seconds since the question.

One minute and twenty since the answer.

Maggie grins at her. “Did you think I’d say no, Danvers? You looked so damned scared.”

“Ha-ha,” Alex says, but then she laughs for real as she tries to slip the ring on Maggie’s finger. She’s shaking so hard it’s like threading a needle.

“Is it too tight? Does it fit?”

“It’s fine,” Maggie says. She wants to get out of the sun, to take Alex down that rocky pathway to their left. The one shaded by Magnolias. She wants to stop and just take this all in. Together. 

But another couple walks by. Retired from the looks of their don’t-give-a-fuck matching polos. The husband, a paunchy fellow with smoker’s lines and aviator glasses, congratulates them and offers to take a picture. 

“You gals don’t want to forget a thing like this.”

And so Maggie and Alex allow the interruption. They stand, their arms around each other, Maggie’s ring shimmering like a mirage in the bright light of early afternoon as they laugh and freeze the moment in amber.

The man apologizes when he hands back the phone.

“I guess I accidentally set it on burst mode.” He chuckles. “You’re going to have a lot of these. Hope it doesn’t take up too much memory.”

On the contrary, they can’t thank the gentleman enough. 

Maggie’s kept every single shot. In bad moments or sometimes good ones, she thumbs through each frame, watching Alex’s lips curve upward in a smile, watching her lean sideways, her sidelong gaze on the camera as kisses Maggie on the cheek. She can still feel the brush of her lips. Hear that whispered, “I love you.”

_Forever._

Alex straightens, silly grin still stretched across her face as the cloud cover passes over them. She relaxes, drops the arm with which she’s been shielding her eyes, and turns her body toward the camera. And as she does, she seems to catch something in the distance. It’s a brief hesitation, not more than a few seconds, but Maggie sees that smile falter just a fraction before she turns and faces their future. 

#

“You’re too close to the monitor.”

The light bursts on and Maggie hunches in the boomseat, groaning as she covers her eyes. “Do you have to do that?”

“You’re going to give yourself a headache?” Alex says.

“Got one. Thanks.” Maggie wipes down the screen with the edge of her sleeve and pulls up the security feed for the Casimir chamber. The room is spherical, its walls covered in a moiré of tiny squares bending and warping in the light like ice cubes on the melt. She’s gone through all the feeds prior to the comms going down. What this Alex thinks she can show her is a mystery. But Maggie has to admit, despite the need for coffee and the caustic rumble in her stomach, her excitement is infectious.

“You get me that feed from LK?”

Alex leans over her shoulder, her eyes narrowing slightly as if she’s appraising a gallery painting. “A bit blurry. Harbor’s collating all incoming while I run decryption. You’ll have plenty to go through when we’re done here.”

“Thanks.”

Satisfied, Maggie retrieves a cup of water and some painkillers left by the drone.

“I should have had you eat first,” Alex says. “You didn’t keep your food down last night.”

“You’re not my nurse, you know.” Maggie pops only one and downs it with the liquid. She can see Alex from the corner of her eye as she readjusts her posture, readies herself for an argument. 

“I am though, right?” It’s less a question than a statement. A gentle rebuff to Maggie’s impatience. “This idea came to me just as I woke up.” She gestures to the monitor, “I got excited and forgot. I’ll have Harbor bring you something.”

“It’s okay,” Maggie says. She catches herself. “You sleep?”

She knows they do, but it’s strange to hear it firsthand. Alex gives her a look like Maggie should know better than to ask.

“I’ve only done it once, so I suppose the simple present isn’t accurate. But yes, we sleep. We need it just like you do.”

“What’s that like?”

Alex folds her hands, starts teasing her thumbs together. “Oh, you know… counterfactual simulations following decoherence of dissonant superimposed states.”

Maggie’s heard about all this. That gemel dream activities reveal quantum branching events, depicting fragments from alternate timelines. Massive implications for human dream activity—or so say all the hooey peddlers. 

“That’s not what I meant.” She snaps a finger at the drone. “Coffee. Black.” Alex shoots her a look of mild disapproval but says nothing. 

“What _did_ you mean?”

“I want to know what you dreamed about?”

“Oh….” Alex tugs at the hem of her shirt and Maggie can swear she’s blushing. “I was… we were arguing.”

Maggie almost doesn’t want to ask. “About what? Sriracha sauce?”

“No,” Alex says, and her face sours with a mix of mystification and embarrassment. “We were in an apartment, but the lease didn’t allow pets. And you brought home this enormous dog. I think it was a St. Bernard, except… it changed.”

Maggie laughs. “Dreams do that.” 

Alex nods. “Right? At one point it had beagle ears. Anyway, it jumped on the furniture. I got angry. I mean, I was furious that you were just going to go ahead and mess up our life plans, and I was worried that the building owner would find out. So I went to confront you, but then.” She looks at her, and her eyes widen with mild incredulity. “Suddenly, I was you, and I was trying to explain to me why you’d brought the dog home in the first place.”

“So gemel dreams are just as boring as people dreams.”

“Did you think it was boring?” Alex asks.

Maggie chuckles and shakes her head. She doesn’t. Not really. Her dream sounds reassuringly messy and human, and not at all like Alex’s phantasmagorical rides or her own somnolent problem-solving. This is new. It’s hers. “Lesson one, Danvers. They're not the greatest conversation pieces. Do you keep a perfect record of your dreams too?”

Alex leans back. “I can call up the details, and your old dreams as well if necessary, but who’d want to, right?” She looks away. “I felt so… helpless.”

“Welcome to the club.” 

The drone appears with two cups of coffee in paper cups. Alex must have subvocalized an order for herself. Maggie takes them from the tray and sets Alex’s on the table to her side.

“You like this stuff,” Alex says. She runs her hand through the steam.

“I do. And you—I mean, Alex did too. But she liked it... likes it sweet.”

Alex leans over and smells it. “Some things are meant to be bitter.”

“My words exactly,” Maggie says, lifting her own to her lips. It’s ship coffee, but passable. “So what’s this great eureka you’ve had?” 

With a slight gesture, Alex turns the boomseat away from the monitor, and Maggie almost spills her drink mid-sip. “Hey!”

“We need more space for me to do this,” Alex says. She tilts her head back and the interior of Casimir chamber flickers in the air between them. Maggie’s heart skips. “What did we say about surprise light shows?”

But Alex ignores her. She’s excited, in character. “Do you remember Professor Chambers? The knight’s move?”

Maggie smirks and puts her cup down. “You pulling up Art and Philosophy now? Where were you during finals?”

Alex shoots her a playful smile, gestures as a three-dimensional image of the chamber rotates between them. “You did well in that class.”

Maggie shrugs. In truth, she’d loved it, even if she hadn’t liked her classmates much. Humanities electives at New Gotham were packed with wealthy kids shoring up their cultural capital and middle-class strivers, hoping some of it would stick. Enthusiasm for the subject matter was taboo: Look too long at a painting, express any earnest appreciation, and those rictus stares would scope you out like carrion birds. Being a poor hayseed, Maggie was free from all that. She could love what she loved, and Chambers loved her for it in return.

“Refresh me,” Maggie says. 

“Viktor Shklovsky. Russian Formalist. Art’s power lies in defamiliarization. Looking at things obliquely.” Alex’s voice is tight, like she’s spent all night preparing, and Maggie feels her heart go out a little.

She’d taken that lesson with her to the academy, not so much as an aesthetic end, but a means to joggle insights and clues from a piece of evidence or a crime scene. It had proven itself valuable. 

“Okay, Danvers. All the directions,” Maggie says. “But from whatever angle, there’s still nothing here.”

Alex waves her hand over the table, casting a dark line over the surface. “See that?”

“Your shadow?”

“I’m a hologram,” Alex says. “This is an augmented reflection, an illusion to give me more physicality. Lesson one. I don’t cast shadows. But shadows are caused by blocked photons.”

She gestures back to the Casimir chamber. “Now, can you find any shadows in here?”

Maggie leans in. They’re hard to spot in the Casimir chamber; it’s a struggle to distinguish between the gray-scale reflections of the surveillance lights and the light blocked out by the orb and the graphene cables keeping it suspended. Alex directs her to three spots in the image, brings it closer. “Here. There. And here.”

Maggie’s mouth goes dry. The penumbra cast by the orb begins to shift inside, colors and faint shapes emerging like something rising to the surface of a cloudy lake. A leather shoe. The rippling hem of a pant leg. In the dark slashes cast by the graphene strands, she sees a hand and a bit of nose and chin. An eye like some cubist painting. 

“I sifted through the information encoded in the shadow,” Alex says. “What’s being blocked out. By doing that we can get a look around the corner, so to speak. See what’s outside the frame. It took a while. Had to go photon by bloody photon, but I could tease out dimensions first, then more specific shapes. And color.”

Maggie’s hand tightens on the boomseat. She squints harder, trying to piece together the fragments of those half-obscured features. “A gemel.” She lets out a breath and smiles. Looks at Alex. “Beats our stone age U.P. imagers any day. This is… how’d you figure it, Danvers?”

“The chamber like the interior of the orb is a vacuum. Any human entering would need to bulk up in a suit. Zero chance of entering undetected, but…” she smiles. “We can float, move through things. Stay out of sight of the security cameras. I can’t hack into the pulse beacon. The encryption is too complicated, but as the interior of the chamber is a vacuum, and as the beacon is dependent on zero-point energy, simple contact with our bodies would run interference. Shutting it down automatically.” Alex makes a slicing motion through the projection. 

“But he had to get inside to do that,” Maggie says. 

“I’ve checked Harbor’s power system. There was a blackout just before he comms went out. Several nanoseconds, just enough of a window to go undetected.” 

“So if we repeat that, can you slip in and reverse it?” Maggie picks up her coffee and takes a sip. 

Alex shrugs. “In theory. I’d be like a set of jumper cables.”

“Good to know.” Maggie tilts her head. “He looks familiar, but I’m not… can you—”

“A composite. Right,” Alex says. “Done.”

She holds up her hand and a pieced-together image of the gemel appears. Male. Late thirties, likely. With red hair and a childish pout like he’s just lost a cakewalk. Maggie remembers him. He was in the bar, at the table full of laughing execs. His gemel wasn’t there.

“Found him,” Alex says.

Maggie starts as his file pings on the monitor behind her. 

“Hans Schireli. Handles Haxen’s off-world P.R. He was quartered in a suite in Central Hub.”

“Headed to Earth to clean up the mess, no doubt,” Maggie says. “Guess he didn’t know he was part of it. And his gemel?”

“One name. Stephan. Not emancipated. He would have had to have done this at Schireli’s request.”

“Any chance it would have survived without him?”

Alex laughs in surprise. It’s almost cutting. “If he wasn’t emancipated then, which I doubt Schireli would have done between the time the comms dropped and the ship blew up, Stephan would have been atomized with his original.”

“Right. Sorry,” Maggie says. 

Emancipating a gemel is a complicated legal process. The argument, if she remembers right, was that it was best to make it binding. No saying ‘I divorce thee’ three times and leaving some poor sentient being out in the cold. Convenient bullshittery.

“Could you sense another gemel if he didn’t?”

“If we’re interacting with the same system, then yes,” Alex says. “But I’ve been working with Harbor since my inception. And there’s been nothing.”

“So why do it if it meant their destruction?”

Her mind flips back to Deuvim, who from her actions most likely thought the Asona would be hit by pirates. Maybe Schireli did, too, but had been duped into thinking he was taking part in the handover. Hoping to profit and get out. For a well-paid executive, it still seemed like a pretty self-destructive trade-off. 

She tries to remember how he looked in the bar. Was he nervous? She thinks she remembers him checking his watch, but she could be embroidering. What she didn’t drink away, the explosion that followed shredded from her memory banks, unless… She turns to Alex. “You can remember what I saw of him. Before the explosion.”

Alex looks at her, not quite understanding. “I do. Yes.”

Maggie sits up, her fingers tight around the now empty coffee cup. “I need you to call up his actions and expressions. Is it possible to sift through the sound like you did here? Maybe tell me what he was talking about if I was standing close enough?”

Alex folds her hands and looks down. She takes in a long ghost breath. 

“You can’t.” 

Alex doesn’t answer, and Maggie feels a sudden pang of guilt. Maybe she’s asking too much. This Alex is new after all. Is it possible to overwhelm her system? 

“I can,” Alex says finally. “It’s just not a good idea.”

The cup crumples in her fist. “What does that mean?”

Alex pushes out a breath. “I mean that you need to think through the details by yourself.”

“I’m trying to,” Maggie says. “And you’re the closest thing I've got to an expert witness.”

“That's my point. You’re a detective, not a trial lawyer.”

Maggie’s jaw drops. She feels ridiculous, like a kid begging her parent for a pack of gum at the register. 

“I’m trying to help you,” Alex says. 

“Well, you’re not.” She bites her lip and tosses the cup into a bin. 

“We’ve already had this conversation,” Alex says. “Your talent for solving cases lies in the details you choose to remember. And to forget. Otherwise, you won’t focus on the relevant information.”

Maggie rubs at the bridge of her nose. “Judging from the way I botched this case, I’m not doing so well at that.” She hears her voice crack at the admission, lets herself slump forward, exhausted and overwhelmed. Alex disappears the image of the chamber and moves closer. She doesn’t touch her but holds a hand over her shoulder. Maggie can feel a faint tingling warmth where it hovers.

“I’m well aware of your rough spots, Sawyer,” Alex says. “But your mind is fine. It’s your emotions that are getting in the way.”

“So now here’s the therapy part,” Maggie says. She looks away. _This is a tantrum, Sawyer. Knock it off._

“You said it yourself in the medbay. Likely PTSD.”

Maggie shakes her head. “What’s a little post-explosion trauma?”

Alex kneels in front of her. “Among other things.” Her mouth quirks. The small hint of a smile. “You need to learn to trust yourself again, Maggie. To regain equilibrium, which you can’t do if you rely too much on this without using that skill you have for hunches.” She taps her own forehead. “I don’t mean that I won’t. But let it tease itself out for a bit. We need to check the feed from LK. Repair the pulse beacon.”

She’s right. As much as she bristles at being coddled — by the medbay, by Alex—this impatience is dangerous. The first priority is surviving. Getting somewhere safe.

Maggie lifts her gaze. “The knight’s move?” 

Alex gives her the kind of smile real Alex gave her in better times. Those mornings they’d gone on walks, sipping coffee and watching people from their favorite park bench. She stands and slides her hands into her pockets. “Let your mind peek around a few more corners, Sawyer. But first food. No Sriracha sauce. And a little rest. Then we’ll get to work on that pulse beacon.”

#

Back in her suite, Maggie checks the time stamp on her cast. Fifty-one hours and thirty-two minutes until she’s free to walk on her own. She lies back against the pillow and brings up the photos of her and Alex in the garden, thumbing forward to that moment Alex’s smile slips. 

What would she see if she asked this Alex to sift through the photons, to draw what she saw in that moment from the shadows?

Kids playing in the fountain they’d passed minutes before?

A couple pushing a stroller?

Or having a fight?

Could have been anything. 

An injured bird, dragging its wing across the pavement.

A plastic bag skittering over that pristine lawn.

Anything at all.

And what good would it do now when there were so many other things she’d missed?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of research for this one. Took a little longer than expected. Thanks for reading!  
> If you're interested, this dastardly piece was responsible for the opening section. I've used playlists for mood and character interactions, but this is the first time something sprang whole from a piece as I was listening to it. It was an exhilarating experience even if the scene itself is a downer. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1hyEjZros8


	8. The Empty Chair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This song. It’s...lovely.”
> 
> “Yeah,” Maggie says. “It is.”
> 
> “You’ve listened to it a lot.”
> 
> “Helps me relax.”
> 
> Alex leans a little closer and those soft browns sharpen with curiosity. “You haven't played it for her.”
> 
> “Who?” 
> 
> “I mean...” She points to herself uncertainly. “Me. Her. You’ve listened to this a total of 847 times."
> 
> Maggie takes a drink. "That's specific."
> 
> "You've never shared it."

_Solitude of one who trembled_

_a temptation from heaven_

_and disenchantment, here is what heaven gave me._

_Will I be well_

_under this veil of weeping._

Ferrer Trindade Mourao Ferreira

Maggie scans the passenger manifest, trying to match faces to messages. Is there anything suspect in their histories, in the ‘get well soons’ and ‘happy birthdays’ that kept her company?

She has nothing on Hans Schireli, an ordinary success story even for Haxen. No suspiciously hasty promotions or scandal-ridden divorces. He was a good Catholic, gave money to respectable charities and spent his vacations volunteering. On his last, he built houses for the refugees from Cora Falls, an orbiting colony pushed out by the instability of its star. 

She pulls up photos from a company news packet. Schireli with his two boys, sleeves rolled up like late-twentieth-century politicians. They stand sweaty and grinning in front of the newly-built frame of a house. In another, he slices burdock root in the kitchen as his wife, glass of wine in hand, whispers conspiratorially to his gemel Stephan. 

What would that be like? To have both a wife anda gemel? There must be scores of cases where one spouse falls for the substitute. She shakes off the thought and stretches, reaffirms her plans to emancipate gemel Alex as soon as they get back to Earth.

She’ll take a break, show her the message to Vinkonour next. Maybe she’ll be able to see something in the numbers, in that strange shape scrawled on the blackboard.

The drone slips in with a tray on which is perched a cup of ice water and her pain meds. She drops the meds in her pocket and removes a small bottle of Koshu, then shoots a glare at the drone. “Tell and I send you outside to repaint the serial number.” She pours a generous shot, stirring it with her index finger and leans back, eyes closed as the music trickles louder over the speakers.

_Solid_ _ã_ _o de quem tremeu_

_à_ _tenta_ _çã_ _o do c_ _é_ _u,_

Amalia Rodrigues.

Her avó Matilde used to play this on an old Crossley turntable, Rodrigues’ voice smoothing over the spit and crackle as the grooves wore into silence. Matilde was from Lisbon; she spoke four languages and her Spanish was accented with the soft _shh_ that lulled Maggie to sleep on those nights she stayed at her home in the Sandhills. 

_e desencanto, eis o que o c_ _é_ _u me deu._

_Serei bem eu_

_sob este v_ _é_ _u de pranto._

The room dims briefly, and Maggie sits up, whirls around to see Alex sliding through the wall paneling. She freezes on Maggie’s expression, tossing a clumsy gesture at the door.

“Sorry. Would you prefer I—“

“No. How's the chamber look?”

Alex tilts her head back, blows a strand of hair from her eyes. "Clean. No damage to the Casimir plates or dielectric interference.”

“And that means...”

“We’re good to go. We can send out a packet as soon as you're ready.”

“And LK?”

“Not much more than static and random sequences, added for authenticity I assume. It sounds like they’ve got a bot running comms down there now. That should get the U.P. sniffing around, but when is another issue." She pauses, the space between her brows crinkling. "You know, they seem really slow on the uptake."

"You figure?" Maggie says, but it’s less a wry response than a discomfiting question. Can Alex intuit more with her faster processing abilities, or does the overflow of memory interfere? She’d like to know more about the mess they're in before she sends out that packet, to at least try to ensure they aren't passing off their location to someone in league with who's done this, but they don't really have much choice. 

She sneaks a look at the readout on her leg. Another twenty-three hours and she’ll be walking, or at the very least able to scratch that patch of now inflamed skin that, without the meds and booze, would have her taking a hacksaw to the brace.

Alex folds her arms, bunching into herself. She’s still off somewhere. Worried. “Not even old scratch has shown up on the comms."

It’s the name she gave the voice standing in for Barry and Eve. Maggie thinks it's perfect. 

"It’s unsettling," Alex says. Her cadence shifts on the last word, creating a cold spot in Maggie's chest. She’s had the same feeling, that there's something far more sinister at work than the desire to steal even a stratospherically lucrative energy source. 

“Other than the usual kind of unsettling?” She keeps her tone flat, almost disinterested.

Alex straightens and begins to pace, her words falling in time with her steps. “I’m not...sure exactly. But... it’s as if there’s something inhuman behind that radio silence. I don't mean bots. It's like they’re all down there...molting. Or something. I don’t know how else to put it.” She looks embarrassed. Apologetic. “This is what you call your imagination getting away, I guess." 

She offers a smile, but it falters halfway, and Maggie feels a sudden tenderness well up inside her. This Alex can define fear, can remember it in all its manifestations, but she’s experiencing its unrecorded version for the first time. She’s half-tempted to offer her the whiskey.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” She pats the arm of the boomseat, baffled by the softness in her tone. “C’mere.”

Alex hesitates, that fear melting into shyness until Maggie gestures again. “Let’s shift the focus for a while. You can help me.”

Alex smiles, lowers herself into a sitting position, hovering in the air next to her. Maggie makes a patting motion in the air above her arm. “Show off.”

The smile stays this time. “Any dirt on Schireli?” 

“Nope.” Maggie takes the sudden companionability to pour more whiskey into her cup, delighting inwardly as Alex lifts an eyebrow. “Guy's cleaner than the chamber." She nods toward the pictures. "I'm about to go through his outbox and I expect nothing but greeting card slogans and letters to his kids. You sure you don’t want to help me out with that?”

Alex nods at the bottle in answer, but then she tilts her head up, her brow furrowed. “This song. It’s...lovely.”

“Yeah,” Maggie says. “It is.”

“You’ve listened to it a lot.”

“Helps me relax.”

Alex leans a little closer, those soft browns sharp. Curious. “You haven't played it for her.”

“Who?” 

“I mean...” She points to herself uncertainly. “Me. Her. You’ve listened to this a total of 847 times."

Maggie furrows her brow and takes a drink. "That's specific."

"You never shared it."

 _Here we go_. Maggie downs the booze and turns to face her. "Remember that part about you being too familiar?" Her tone is hard even as the observation tugs at her. A thread unraveling her insides.

But Alex holds her in her gaze. “But this was a conscious decision. A pattern of avoidance.”

 _You have a pattern._ That’s what Alex used to say to her. It always started like that. 

_A pattern._

_You keep secrets._

_You've got to learn to trust, Maggie._

She bites her lip. “You know everything already, right? So why ask.”

“Because it’s better for you to articulate it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

_Because it hurts. Because I never got to see her again. Because these are my fucking memories and if I give them to someone else…_

“As you said, I've already got them,” Alex says. She holds a hand to her chest. "They aren't going anywhere."

Maggie freezes. She can’t read her thoughts. There is no way she—but she knows her. She knows enough.

Then Alex lifts her hand, her palm outstretched and luminous. Maggie squints into the light as Alex dips it under her nose.

“What are you—“

She lowers her head, the slightest of motions. “Don’t talk,” she says. “Breathe. It will only last an instant.”

Before she can protest, Maggie is enveloped by the scent of dust and sagebrush, of smoky exhaust from the nearby highway. She flashes back to her avó's front yard in the Sandhills, the quilt of grass in various stages of desiccation, the ironwood leaning over the porch as if privy to her secrets. Matilde still taught science at the polytechnic high school. They used to visit her often. Until Elena got involved with the church.

Matilde was a vocal agnostic bordering on atheist. Elena thought she was a bad influence.

Maggie loved going there. She’d sit outside in the swing, watching Matilde’s cat Mika swat at the moths under the porchlight.

"It's a leftover tic of evolution. They were meant to follow the moon," Matildetold her."But then we came along with our artificial light and they got a one-way ticket to our porch screens."

The thought made Maggie sick. Like someone shouting out random digits when you were trying to remember a password, or waving their hands in your face as you read, but this was massive. Life-wrecking. She thought about the kids wrapping their stretchscreens over their eyes, about her mother who was spending more and more time praying with that youth pastor and his pasty goons.

You could aim your whole existence at something, something you were sure enough about to die for, and have it turn out to be meaningless. An accident of one species blithely tromping ahead of another.

"Blue Springs feels like that sometimes," Maggie said. 

Matilde laughed and took a seat beside her on the porch swing. "People talking of the moon when they're really staring into street lamps?" She raked a hand through her hair. "It's good that you see that, Margarita."

Maggie glanced out at the plain in front of her, the low hills softened by stretches of tall grass. "Wish I didn't sometimes."

Matilde wrapped an arm around her, tugged her close to her body. “You’ve got an enviable clarity of mind.” She squeezed her shoulder and then stood. “You can cut yourself on that sharpness, but if you aim it the right way, it will protect you, help you carve out a path."

She strolled over to the screen door and opened it, just wide enough to reach for the light switch on the other side. “The moon’s still out.” She nodded up at the porchlight before switching it off. “Shall we help them find their way again?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a hella long chapter that will be released in short bursts throughout the week. It took a long detour into her past and Blue Springs. I'm sorry for this, but I'm less confident about posting large chunks while teaching and under the influence soul/attention-sucking zoom god. The Empty Chair refers to a later section, so there's a hint. Thanks for reading! 
> 
> Here's the song Maggie is listening to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRoTxqX5TVc


	9. Spaceshot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More of a dip into Maggie's backstory here. I couldn't stop.

The memory recedes fast and quiet, like the ocean just after a quake. Maggie sits up, looks at Alex, who’s pulled her hand away. She gazes back at Maggie, her eyes soft and contemplative. 

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I’m tired of watching you run in circles.”

“Are you?” Maggie’s tone is sharp, combative, but she reaches up and feels the wetness on her cheeks, and the words, shaken loose by the shock, roll out. “That was the last time I saw her. My Mom wouldn’t let us visit.” She shook her head, her mouth drawn. “Made excuses. Don’t know why I’m telling you this if you know.”

But those words are so much bluster. 

She knows. 

Darwin Elias touted gemels as his high-tech version of the Empty Chair Technique. In gestalt therapy, you spoke to an imagined figure, then switched places and talked right back to yourself. A gemel could do that job more efficiently, he argued. It would hand back your shame and your fear and your ugliness, minus the wasted hours of self-deception. 

“Maggie.” Alex’s eyes are tired and laced with concern. “You need to say it.”

Those words. What she’d said to Alex that last night in their apartment. Maggie forced an answer from her, hoping that like a fever spike or a dose of chemo, she could burn off that facsimile of the woman she’d fallen in love with, that Alex’s desire for kids and a life less interesting would pass through and out of her.

A phantom. 

Some residue of normative shame that her words would finally expunge. 

_We can’t be together._

And then they could go back to their lives.

Could they _please_ go back to their lives? 

“Hey.” Alex reaches out, the light from her palm casting warmth over the backs of her hands, and Maggie arcs up from the memory. Rescued by its ghost.

If she could stand, she’d push herself up and walk out, find a portal to stare out of until the void restored her cynicism. But she faces Alex and the sadness breaks from her like a wave. 

“I was at my aunt’s when it happened.” She dips her face into her hands and breathes, some part of her still trying to balance the sweetness of her avó’s memory with what followed. “After the accident.”

Alex nods, pulls into herself a little, the memory visceral and present. “Skyhook?” 

Maggie nods. 

She hadn’t wanted to go. 

She’d wanted to stay in, curled up under an unzipped sleeping bag on Eliza’s sofa, watching horror flicks as their bodies inched closer. 

It worked like this. 

If the movie was scary, they’d sit through the whole thing, nudging each other at a jump scare or a drawn-out silence. Then Eliza might slip a leg over Maggie’s and lean in, her breath tickling her neck. Maggie would wrap her arms around her, for comfort, she told herself, until Eliza’s hand drifted across her stomach, fingers warm as they slipped beneath the folds of her shirt. They would fall into each other, their breath still quickening even after the credits rolled and the monsters were vanquished.

If it was bad, things moved faster, Eliza making cracks at the acting or the stupid rubber masks, turning those jibes on Maggie, until they were shoving each other, then wrestling, and then kissing in a way she never had with the few boys at her school who’d tried.

Maggie was on the cusp of fifteen. Had never dated. Hadn’t even thought much about it, but she was, for as much as she knew of these things, in love. 

So much in love.

Maggie wanted to tell her. She was hoping Eliza would say it back, give her more than the notes Elena found in her cigar box. 

_I wish we weren’t here,_ they read.

_I wish we were alone so I could kiss you._

_You gave me a damned hickey, you know. Lucky it’s winter._

Elena tore up the notes, sent them scattering like the newspaper littering their hen cages. “You think this is okay?” she said. “You think that because what your teachers tell you and those other kids that this is okay? You’ll be punished for this. Eternity, Margarita. Do you know what that means?” 

But Eternity was being stuck in a town with only the illusion of prospects. To be one of those kids, walking around slack-jawed with the smart-fabric over their eyes. There was no chance to be yourself here, to feel free from words like “eyes” or “reputation.” 

She’d thought, hoped that Oscar would stand up for her, but other than a little baffled laughter, he merely listened as Elena blamed him for letting Maggie roughhouse with the neighborhood boys, for encouraging her to wear jeans and sneakers. “You did this to her,” she said. “You could have stopped it. I warned you.”

He said nothing. To her or to Maggie. This wasn’t a time to make scenes. 

He was running for Sherriff, after all. Even had some billboards up along the 112 and the 77. Maggie felt a surge of pride every time they drove past one, although she laughed and teased him about his slogan.

_Protecting what YOU value most._

Who was the _you_?

He spent more time working and canvassing the local neighborhoods, the developments where Skyhook’s employees played tennis and sipped cocktails behind iron fences.

Maggie lived in that house like a ghost. Oscar gone. Elena barely speaking to her. She was pleasant enough, did all the mom things, but Maggie knew that under that flat, pious smile, she was thinking. Planning something she’d spring on her the way she did when she’d signed her up for one of those Princess-by-Design courses. Maggie had gotten herself kicked out by deliberately belching and chewing with her mouth open, convincing the other girls that climbing up the drainpipe in their prairie dresses was the coolest thing in the world. 

This felt far worse.

If she told Eliza how she felt, it would at least be real. No one could ever take that back.

But instead, Trey Davis appeared in the basement window, almost breaking it as he rapped impatiently against the glass. Eliza, as if under a spell of stupid, propped a milk crate against the wall, hopping atop it to open the window. 

“Told you I had a surprise, Mags.”

Trey leaned in, hair falling in front of his face so that Maggie could only see his teeth. That stupid leer that never left his face. 

“Hey, ladies. Ready to see some rockets?”

Rockets. 

Blue Springs got its spaceshot when Maggie was in first grade. A private starport.

Grand and shiny and taking up the 40,000 acres once used for soy and grain sorghum, the cattle made obsolete in an age of lab-grown animal protein. The governor and Mayor Gifford bought those farmers out for pensions and peanuts, promising that Gage county, population 31,053, wasn’t only back on the map of America, but one to the stars. 

Skyhook Tech was into fiber optics, the kind best made in zero gravity. They had production centers orbiting Earth and the moon and came to Nebraska for the low tax rates. Their CEO, John Tierney, was the type—and there were many—who liked crowing over on NASA’s tombstone. “Maybe if they’d advertised those scratch-resistant lenses and insulin pumps,” he said, “we wouldn’t be out here doing their jobs.” He said that at every fucking press conference. 

“Things weren’t good before they got here,” Oscar told her, whenever the rattle from a test launch spooked the dog or sent the sagebrush sparrows scattering from the trees. “You’re lucky you don’t remember.”

But Maggie does remember. She remembers the worn textbooks and beat-up equipment at her elementary school, the boarded-up shops along a Main Street that hadn’t been main in more than forty years. She remembers Elena, working the farm and the house, trying to stay cheerful until she listed into loneliness and that church.

With the Alcubierre flip stations strung up at Jupiter and beyond, the world needed space on the ground to reach more of it. Advancements in Selluvium processing, used in gravity plate technology, also meant you didn’t need that equatorial kick from Cape Canaveral or Kourou to launch anymore. Besides, most of those places were underwater. The Cape, what was left of it, was an artificial island made of carbon nanofiber from which Hedley’s Lift climbed like some monstrous vine toward the clouds. 

“It’s growing,” Matilde had told her, pointing to a hulking gluey shape on their viewscreen. “Tiny fibers vibrating like cilia. They communicate. And up there, where you can’t yet see it, another branch is unfurling to meet them. When it’s done, going up will be as easy as stepping inside an elevator.” 

For a few years, the mood in Blue Springs was buoyant. Maggie’s school got a new library and a computer lab. Downtown, long hollowed-out by the influx of Big Box retailers on the highways, bloomed from boarded-up shop fronts into the quaint stereotype of a Western town, bustling with restaurants, and a General Store. But most of those businesses weren’t owned by the locals, and the fusion dishes, not to mention their prices, signaled they weren’t meant for them either. 

Skyhook employees commuted in on jets and long-range hovercraft, secluding themselves in the ziggurats that went up and blocked the views of the plains. But there was work and hope, and rockets that lit the sky like a constant, deafening reminder. Cheer up, they said. Future’s bright.

And when Skyhook came, the Rodas family prospered. Outwardly, at least. 

Oscar worked liaison with the company’s private security detail, guarding the port and ensuring the townspeople stayed clear of the perimeters now crisscrossing the flatland. Maggie moved on to Tryon middle school and then high school, where she kept her grades up because her parents promised she was going to college. A good one. 

At least that part hadn’t changed. Not until that night. 

Oscar raged about the idiots who cut the fences, those hunters he’d caught just two klicks from the launch pad. And there were other dangers besides getting caught, launchpad accidents, toxic fuel that came down with the shunted off debris. And there was Trey. A shitheel with a reputation for preying on freshman girls. Eliza knew this, she’d even joked that he was hanging around the junior high, but now she was wriggling through the window, laughing at the jokes Trey made about her needing to cut the carbs. And it wasn’t _her_ laugh. It had none of that edge, the dry sarcasm that made Maggie wilt the first time they’d met.

She ducked her head in the window. “Mags? You coming?”

It could have been the cold from outside, but a numbness drew over her like a curse in one of the movies they'd watched. One of those bleak Japanese films where no one got away. She looked up at the girl that was once Eliza and put on her coat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so, so sorry for the delay. This chapter is written out and there's more on the way (another chunk in the morning provided life behaves) but the structure was/is murdering me. Thank you for reading.


	10. Inclination

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maggie had never been drunk. She’d only sipped at the glasses of wine Matilde offered her on holidays and birthdays, much to Elena's disapproval. But she unscrewed the cap and lifted the neck to her lips, trying not to listen as Trey, his arm now slung around Eliza's shoulders, boasted about the last launch they'd snuck into, how it carried a weapons payload for Huck Security. 
> 
> It went down like pancake syrup and car exhaust. 
> 
> "Atta girl." Charlotte patted her back. "Life on the dark side." 

Wilson’s bluff was the highest elevation point in Gage country. “Well above sea level,” the locals were fond of saying, although it was less boast than reassurance. Kids had always trekked up there to drink and make out in the thin scrub of privacy offered by the cottonwoods, but Skyhook owned it now, which meant dodging searchlights and crawling under fences, keeping an eye out for the security vans threading the area with their high beams. By the time Maggie was in high school, breaking in wasn't so much rebellion as it was a reminder of its futility. Kids leaping toward the sun only to find themselves earthbound, watching as their wealthy infiltrators took to the stars.

Maggie felt sick when they got in the car, even sicker when Eliza sat shotgun and let Trey slip a hand on her knee. But she stayed quiet, her words choking inside her as they laughed, and Eliza sang along to _Nude on the Moon_ —a band she hated—growing more and more oblivious to Maggie’s existence. The others were already waiting up top, their gathering camouflaged by smartcloth, a material that reflected back the landscape, and was one of Skyhook's more profitable byproducts. They were all seniors: Dave Marston, Chet Barnes, and Becky Samms, people Maggie largely found uninteresting, but she balked when she saw Charlotte Kwan.

Tryon high’s resident bitch queen with a glare that could strike down the football stadium.

She shot one at Trey as he dropped a case of beer at her feet.

An offering to a wrathful god.

Trey looked at her, mouth slack. "What?"

Charlotte gestured to Maggie and Eliza. "They're babies, Trey. They should be home asleep."

"But I brought Fathead ale."

For the first time, Maggie wanted to laugh at something he said. 

Charlotte leaned back, running her eyes over Maggie until it felt like she was prodding through her insides.

"Her dad's a cop," she said to Trey. "You knew that at least, right?"

Trey gaped at Maggie, his mouth stretching even wider if that was possible. “Oh… shit. Heh.”

"Your dad know you're out here?" Charlotte said.

Being brown and working-class, Maggie had long learned to handle a sneer or a snide remark. She was good at knowing when to ignore a jibe or lob one right back, but now she was too busy pushing down the ache crawling up inside her, trying not to watch as Eliza tugged Trey’s hand from behind, pulling him to a blanket in front of the space heater.

“No,” Maggie said. “He doesn’t.” She walked right past Charlotte and stepped into the tent, taking a seat on the ground opposite. If she angled herself just right, the heater could almost block the two of them from view. But there was that laugh, the one that didn’t sound like Eliza, and Maggie winced as Eliza snapped a beer open, giggling as it spat foam down her front. Trey, oblivious, saw Maggie’s expression and pulled another from the case. "You want some?" 

He made to pass it over to her, but Charlotte grabbed his wrist. Hard. The can dropped with a sodden thud.

Charlotte strolled loosely around the heater and crouched down next to her, pressing a slim, silver flask into her hand.

"Beer will just make you colder, kid,” she said. Maggie blinked at her. Her tone was cool, but there was a kindness underneath it. Hands shaking, Maggie took the offering, keeping her eyes on its flat, silvery surface with the name of the Tharsis Distillery engraved on the front. That was where Oscar spent his downtime.

Drinking beer.

Avoiding Elena.

Maggie had never been drunk. She’d only sipped at the glasses of wine Matilde offered her on holidays and birthdays, much to Elena's disapproval. But she unscrewed the cap and lifted the neck to her lips, trying not to listen as Trey, his arm now slung around Eliza's shoulders, boasted about the last launch they'd snuck into, how it carried a weapons payload for Huck Security. 

It went down like pancake syrup and car exhaust. 

"Atta girl." Charlotte patted her back. "Life on the dark side." 

Eliza laughed again. She reached up to brush a leaf from Trey’s hair, and Maggie tipped the flask again.

“Whoa, kid,” Charlotte said. “That’s enough.”

Maggie swallowed hard against the burn in her throat, but the ache inside her receded. Not nearly enough, but it was something.

Until she looked up.

They hadn’t even waited for privacy. Eliza was sitting in Trey’s lap, his hand sliding over her ass as he shoved his rank, goopy tongue down her throat. Maggie felt the muscles in face tighten, holding her breath, stifling it until her chest ached.

“Oh…” Charlotte’s hand settled on Maggie’s back. "Well…This is fucked for you, isn't it?" 

Maggie didn’t answer and didn’t move, and suddenly Charlotte’s arms were slipping under hers, lifting her up as if she were a sack of feathers. “Let’s go for a walk, kid.”

Eliza pulled back in surprise, a string of spit trailed from Trey's lips to hers. "Mags? You okay?”

Maggie didn’t answer. She kept her head down, but she could hear Charlotte’s voice drop through the air like a guillotine. “I think she’s had a bit much.”

“You're going to miss it.” Trey said. “This is the best spot."

“Like I give a fuck,” Charlotte said, more to herself. She shoved the tent flap out and marched Maggie into the cold. They walked back the way they’d come, Charlotte nudging her forward in silence until the smell of beer dissipated and the voices from the inside were so much muffled chatter.

“Do you?” she asked when they’d gotten far enough away.

“No," Maggie said. She was trying to sound cool, but her voice broke a little. 

"Knew you were smart." They ducked into the shadow of an elm, and Maggie lifted her gaze. The tent was just a rippling patch against the frozen landscape, and if she narrowed her eyes enough, she could blur it away, pretend there was no Trey. No Eliza inside to betray her.

“Sorry about your friend," Charlotte said.

Maggie nodded, felt the tears trying to push out of her again. Why was it worse when people were kind? She could be as stoic as her father until someone offered comfort, and then she'd be wailing like a toddler in the checkout line. She pushed out a breath, tried to settle herself, but the tears came anyway.

Charlotte stepped forward and wrapped an arm around her. "I've been there a lot, and it never stops sucking." 

Maggie nodded into her shoulder, her slight body shaking, loosening a little against her warmth. 

"You really like her?"

"Yeah," Maggie said. She pulled back and wiped her sleeve over her face. 

“Why?” Charlotte's tone was so baffled that Maggie laughed despite herself.

"I don't know."

Charlotte took another sip from the flask and grimaced. “Most people don’t care, you know. Just the crazies.”

Maggie glanced at her uncertainly. "My mom is one of the crazies.”

"And your dad?"

“Pretends to be when it suits him.”

"And he wants to be Sherriff of Blue Springs." Charlotte gave her a sly smile, gesturing broadly to the flatlands below, to the jagged bones of the launch facility in the distance. “In the town of the future.” 

Her sarcasm hit Maggie like a dip in cold water. In Blue Springs, you didn’t question the narrative, about the technology, about progress. The word colonization had even come back into vogue. Appeared in ads with a diverse and cheerful cast of astronauts staring gallantly into the distance.

“How quickly we forget,” Matilde had said, before switching off the viewscreen.

As if to chide Charlotte, the ground began trembling, tickling the undersides of Maggie’s feet, as a rumble, low and distant, sounded across the expanse. They turned back, the air vibrating with sound as the first trail of light climbed the sky.

Up.

Up.

Up.

Another burst of sound as a second rocket launched, the facility beneath it now enveloped in cloud as the air around them ruptured. The first one pitched, completing its roll with the grace of an old circus acrobat. Maggie had seen a lot of launches, but none of them from this elevation, with the plain spread beneath them; the sky and earth seemed to blend into each other. Another world. For an instant, she was grateful to be out there, able to forget the heartbreak that would follow her home through the cold.

“Idiot,” Charlotte said. "That fucking fool!"

Maggie looked toward the tent, saw light slotting from it as Trey pushed himself out. He was drunk. Staggering toward the drop off. He turned and waved. At nothing. At something.

At Eliza and Dave, who’d followed him out.

“Come on!” His voice was a wisp over the din. “They’ll be right on top of us!”

Another burst, this time loud enough that Maggie’s hands sprang to her ears. Charlotte leaned in and shouted. “They’re going to get us spotted. Let's go. My car's back down the trail. Jesus fuck."

Maggie would have said yes, would have turned away and run, but they were at the precipice now, and Trey was sitting on the ground, legs over the side. He pushed off, lifting his arms and whooping over the rattle as he slipped from view.

There wasn't much danger to it. Before it was off-limits, kids used it to sled all the time, and she wasn't worried so much about getting caught. Eliza was the tough one after all. But that portent, the thing she'd felt earlier reared up through the heartbreak, gripped her insides like a wrench.

“Eliza!” Maggie ran forward, toward that uncertain shadow of a girl she'd once thought stronger than herself. “Eliza don’t!”

Eliza turned back, her chest lifting as she and Maggie locked eyes, and then she dropped off the edge of the world. 

A flash.

The sound of the world splitting open. 

Maggie slipped mid-step and hit the snow ass first. She opened her eyes, the sight stretching before her. 

A wall of black streaked with light. At the center, a white-hot Chrysanthemum, expanding as coils of smoke billowed outward from its center.

"Damn thing blew!" Charlotte said. "Didn't even have a chance to roll!" 

And it was right over them.

Maggie wrenched in a breath and pushed herself up, stumbled toward the edge of the bluff. She could see them below, lanky shadows at the center of all that snow. She saw Eliza hit bottom, still laughing as she brushed it from her jeans.

“Kid?” Charlotte said. “We’d better—"

"No," Maggie said. "No, no, no."

They were all three of them running into the field, slowing as they took in the conflagration above them.

Heart rattling, the light still searing her vision, Maggie sank to the earth and swung her legs over, peering over the steep embankment. If she could reach her, they could take cover. She could—

“No, kid!” Charlotte’s arms were wrapped around her middle, hoisting her up and away, back toward the trees. Maggie fought and kicked, her shoes tossing up the snow.

“We’ve got to go!” Charlotte said. “Now!”

Already the light above them was fading, the cloud dimming into ash, white tendrils spiraled from the smoke with an eerie slowness, buoyed by the air. Maggie’s insides coiled. The roar in her ears was pricked by something high-pitched and clean. 

_Shiiiiiiaannk_

The first bit of debris hit far away, skipped across the flatlands like a stone.

When Skyhook came, Oscar brought home a book on rockets. Told her about guidance.

Payload.

Propulsion.

_Shiiiiiiaannk_

A shard from the heat shield.

He taught her how a rocket rolled to align itself with its azimuth.

How they calculated the inclination.

How the engines applied torque.

_Shiiiiiiaannk_

A crumpled Vernier thruster.

S _hiiiiiiiik!_

_Shiiiiiiiik!_

_Shiiiiiiiik!_

The field was spattered in debris and smoke, and Maggie still writhing in Charlotte’s arms, called out one more time.

Eliza didn’t look back.

She was too busy watching the sky fall.


	11. A Line in the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You want me to take her downtown?” 
> 
> “Oscar, you--“
> 
> “Lock her up for a night with the drunks and the addicts? Would that satisfy you?”
> 
> “Oscar.”
> 
> The footsteps halted. Third time was the charm.
> 
> TW in the end notes.
> 
> “I’ve spoken to Pastor Joe,” Elena said. “There’s a school. She can go and wait for this thing to die down. It will show Skyhook and Gifford that you’re willing to do what’s necessary.”

“I shouldn’t have gone,” Maggie says. “I should have stopped her.”

“She wouldn’t have listened,” Alex says. 

Maggie’s shivering now, her soul somewhere back in that cold Nebraska winter.

Alex moves closer, blanketing her in her glow and Maggie leans in enough that she’s inside her, her body overlapped in an illusion formed by particles of light. Even the densest materials are made out of nothing, she thinks. 99% of empty space. In that, she and this Alex are really no different.

Can she feel her? she wonders. Does even this faint contact with matter draw out a sense memory? 

Maggie couldn’t feel much after that night. Not for a long time. 

Eliza and Dave were killed instantly. A chunk of fuselage hit them just as they wised up, just as they tried to run. Miraculously, Trey made it out with a minor burns. When the crews made it out there, they found him hunched and shivering amid the lingering smoke and hoar-frost, that slack mouth closed for the first time in his life. 

The others and Charlotte and Maggie were safe.

But the debris kept falling.

On the feeds, local and national.

The kids at school—the kind Charlotte usually sent slithering back into their lockers—had already pegged Maggie as odd. But Charlotte was pulled from school until the end of the term, and those mouths yapped freely to a “local” press, who filed their briefs from Winnipeg and Kuala Lumpur.

Maggie became less onlooker than instigator. Guilt by survival. Her closeness to the victim all the more reason for indictment. 

_Division Chief’s Daughter at Scene of Skyhook Tragedy_. 

_Cop’s Kid and Victim ‘Close’_

So Maggie stayed home. She sat on the sofa near the window, listening past the ring in her ears as her parents discussed her the way they might the wasp’s nest in the barn.

“You have to do something,” Elena said. “If you let this go, they’ll think you're unprincipled.”

Oscar said nothing, or if he said anything, it was only a mild note of protest. The man who ruled Blue Springs with a ruggedness and stern demeanor grew pliant in the face of Elena’s rage.

“It was her friend,” Oscar said finally. “Do you think Margarita wanted to go out there?”

“Her friend?” Elena said, mocking him. Maggie bunched herself up on the sofa, wrapped her arms tightly around her knees, squeezing her body into a smaller and smaller space. Something manageable. Acceptable.

“Leave that out of this,” Oscar said. The floorboards creaked above her as he paced in the cramped space of her parents’ bedroom, his footsteps a language unto themselves. Maggie had seen him do it often enough, on the porch or in the station, the scuff of his boots marking time as he listened to Elena fume or a report from a colleague. Sometimes, they said, _I’m worried_ , or _I want you to think I’m taking you seriously._ Tonight, they said something else.

_I’m trapped, but I’m going to keep you waiting. Make you at least think this is my choice._

“You have to do something, Oscar.”

“You want me to take her downtown?” 

“Oscar, you--“

“Lock her up for a night with the drunks and the addicts? Would that satisfy you?”

“Oscar.”

The footsteps halted. Third time was the charm.

“I’ve spoken to Pastor Joe,” Elena said. “There’s a school. She can go and wait for this thing to die down. It will show Skyhook and Gifford that you’re willing to do what’s necessary.”

What Maggie remembers next is a snowy expanse halved by the highway. Farm houses flitting by, hollow and abandoned, their paint long stripped by the elements. 

“You’re going to take a break from here,” Elena had told her. “For a while.” And Maggie knew from the condescension in her tone that Elena thought she was springing it on her. That Maggie hadn’t had time to prepare, to load her stretch screen with books and music and tuck it in the compartment she’d carved into the heel of her boot. Eliza had taught her that trick. It was where she stashed her cigarettes.

She sat in the back of Oscar’s squad car, the suitcase they’d packed jammed into the space between the passenger seat and the metal partition the separated them. She asked where they were going. More than once, but Oscar didn’t answer. He drove in silence, his phone buzzing, shrill and incessant, in the front seat. He seemed frightened of it and Maggie watched him through the grate, wondering who the real prisoner was. 

After a few minutes, he glowered and picked it up.

“Rodas.”

He listened in silence for a beat and then snarled out a response. “Don’t you speak like that about my wife. When you have a daughter, then you can—”

Whoever it was, they were somewhere in the middle of the conversation. An argument that had been going for days. Maggie felt a draught, saw the small crack in the window and undid her seatbelt, scooting to the other side of the passenger seat.She couldn’t see Oscar’s face from there, but his neck was taut, his body hunched forward. He was pressing his foot to the gas as if he was trying to outrace the voice on the other end. 

“It’s already decided.”

They were getting closer to a town, the billboards and blocks of storage space growing thicker like some drab metallic forest. Maggie saw a truck stalled in the snow. The driver, a smudge of skin and Gore-Tex, flagging down a hover drone for help. 

“We’re about to pull into Davis. Why?”

Maggie pushed herself up, saw the green square of the exit sign up ahead. 

“Wait... _Where_ are you?” he said, Oscar’s tone was hushed, incredulous. 

He listened for a moment and then let out a sigh and hurled the phone at the seat. Maggie, having forgotten to refasten her seatbelt, tumbled toward the other side of the passenger seat as the squad car veered onto the shoulder of the road. 

What happened next was a blur. 

“Papi?” Maggie said.

Oscar glanced back at her, his face a mask of controlled anger. “Just stay here.”

It was a strange scene, that blue Saturn pulling up behind them. Maggie had been on a few ride-alongs, had watched from the car as Oscar or one of his officers approached a car cautiously, sometimes laughing with the driver or handing out a speeding ticket. But now it was like they were in some backwards universe. Oscar sat in the front, powerless, waiting for a civilian to decide his fate.

A figure emerged from the other vehicle.

A woman.

Dark haired, her slight form bulked in a thick coat. She looked a bit like Maggie, but with all the tired cynicism not yet etched on Maggie’s face.

Her aunt Luisa.

Oscar’s younger sister. A counselor in Rapid City. “The liberal,” Oscar affectionately called her. “The liberal,” Elena had said, without so much as an ounce of warmth. 

Luisa never came to Blue Springs. Maybe once or twice when Maggie was small. Elena was why, that was certain, but Luisa was always working. Rapid City was still the health care center for five states, and with aerospace moving to the Heartland, an even more crucial hub. Maggie had visited her a few times. She’d liked Luisa’s apartment with its minimalist but comfortable furnishings, her proud singledom that said you didn’t have to stay stuck with someone the way her parents were stuck with each other.

Oscar shoved the door open and stepped out, making his way toward her. Luisa saw Maggie, and that expression grew harder. Maggie sank down, then pressed the lever, rolling down the window so she could hear. The snow was coming down harder now, and she dipped her head out, saw Luisa stop in front of him. 

“You really want to do this?”

Oscar didn’t answer. He started pacing, his figure blurred by the snow and the steam rising from the exhaust pipe, already a ghost. Luisa clasped his arm, forced him back around to face her.

“This isn’t you.”

“You don’t know me,” he said. 

She offered a hesitant smile. “Remember before Mom got the guts to leave Dad? Remember what you did when he hit me?”

“This isn’t that.”

“Remember how you grabbed the bat from the closet and smacked him in the gut? Oh, you took a beating for it, but you were so proud of yourself. And you should have been. I don’t know what Elena’s fed you,” Luisa said. “But if you do this, sure, you might win the election, be the biggest fish in that shitty little pond. But you’ll never feel this again.” She pressed a gloved hand to her chest. “That pride you get for standing up for what’s right. For truly protecting the innocent. That’ll be...” She made a snapping motion with her fingers.

Luisa took a step back. Oscar was shivering now, his head down. Chastened.

“We’re a twenty minute drive from the state line,” she said, “where the kind of place you’re taking her to is a crime. She’ll be safe. I know people who can really help her. Not those poisonous charlatans. You want that, don’t you?”

“Elena--” Oscar said. 

“Elena,” Luisa said, and she smiled as if relishing the thought. “Elena won’t say a damned thing because we both know she cares more about her reputation than even her precious god. She won’t be able to touch her.”

Luisa moved closer. She peered up at him, her eyes warmer and more confident. “If you do this, you’ll never forgive yourself. Let me help her, Oscar. Let me help you both.”

And then, Maggie saw the strangest thing. Her father, who’d never cried in front of her, was crumpling, his face wet, his shoulders shaking with cold and grief. Luisa wrapped her bulky arms around him as he sank into her.

“It’s right,” Luisa said, her gloved hand pressing gently against his back. “You know it’s the right thing.” 

They stood there long enough for Maggie to think they'd freeze in place, stand there until the snow piled around their ankles. And then Oscar stiffened. He rose and turned and strode back around the car as if afraid he’d lose his momentum. Maggie slapped her fingers down on the window lever, but Oscar was already pulling the door open, and Maggie looked up her cheeks burning against the snowflakes on her skin. 

“Why is Tia here, Papi?” she said. 

Oscar let out a breath, but he didn’t look at her. Instead he stared off as if into his own future. Maggie looked in that direction, too, saw the dark rotation of a storm cloud in the distance.

“Take your things,” Oscar said, and the words choked in his throat. “There's been...there's been a change of plans.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Mention of child abuse. Oblique reference to conversion therapy. 
> 
> Back to the mystery in the next chapter, which I'm really excited about. Thanks for reading.


	12. White Hole Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's no law of robotics keeping you from offing someone. Am I right?”
> 
> "Law of robotics?” Alex's mouth goes flat. Her nostrils flare as if there’s a real set of lungs inside her. 
> 
> "You know what I mean."
> 
> "No," she says. "Enlighten me.” That look of playful discovery is gone. Alex slides off the control panel and stands so rigidly Maggie thinks she might go solid and shatter. That’s when Maggie remembers. Robot is a slur for gemels, the way toaster is for bots. 

"I remembered him leaving me there.” Maggie leans forward, closing her eyes as if trying to will back that night. “I remembered him telling me to take my suitcase and get out, but not that."

Alex takes a moment to gather her words, her warm browns watchful and uncertain. “He loved you, Maggie. He let himself get trapped, but it was there."

"Then why did I forget?"

Alex lifts a hand, makes to brush Maggie’s cheek, and then stops, smiling sadly at the futility of it. “The whole world was working against you. Ambiguity meant vulnerability when you couldn’t afford it.”

"So I just blocked it out then?" Her voice wavers, seasick. "Let the old man rot?” She presses her palms to her eyes and finds her skin dry to the touch. It's like she’s wept away her allotment for this part of her life.

Alex moves around to face her, lowering herself until their sightlines meet. "He had a role in it too. He had your stubbornness, that damned reticence. It would have pushed you both back before you'd even started." She reaches out again, her hand inches away from Maggie's cheek, and Maggie feels it this time, warm lines tracing along her skin like a caress. She closes her eyes and leans into it. It's not real, but she'll take what she can get. 

"These stories we tell ourselves are software," Alex says. "They provide impetus, keep us functioning and protect us, but sometimes they overwrite the truth."

"So I'm bugged," Maggie says, and the slightest hint of a laugh escapes her.

"Like the best of us."

They sit silently amid the steady hum of the ventilation system, Alex waiting, granting that faint substitute for skinship until Maggie can gather herself up. After a few minutes, she straightens and shoves up her sleeves, a ritual motion signaling that her survival programs have booted up and it’s time to get back to work. "Let’s just focus on the situation,” she says.

Alex looks as if she wants to say something more, but she rises and Maggie feels her warmth recede, and it’s like being tossed out into the snow again. 

"Harbor, load the Vinkonour tape.”

"No need, Harbor,” Alex says. “I've got it prepped."

Maggie blinks at her. It's a constant thing, this need to remind herself that everything before she went under is part of Alex's memory and more quickly accessible. But what this Alex chooses to access, to mull over in those down hours when Maggie’s asleep, or when they're sitting across from each other in the mess, stays a mystery.

Alex hops atop the control panel, wedging herself into a sitting position in the corner. “I've been thinking about it.”

“Have you?" Maggie smiles, despite herself.

“Like you haven’t?”

They share a look, a shimmer of rapport before returning to the business at hand. With a bend of the wrist, Alex conjures up a three-dimensional image of the video—that tweedy bastard with the placating smirk and the old school chalkboard in the background.

"Now this..." She taps at the air, her fingers drawing out that bizarre object from the blackboard, spinning and shaping it like she's at a potter's wheel. “This is fascinating.” 

Maggie has to push the boomseat back to take it all in, marveling as the object unfurls between them, folding into itself and disenveloping in a simulation of four-dimensional space. And it is fascinating. And disorienting and unnerving. Maggie experiences, as she does with all such things--quark spin and the size of the universe, the maddening nature of time—that vertigo that comes with a fleeting grasp of something beyond her perception. She grapples with it, hangs on for as long as she can until her human limitations show it the door.

Just long enough.

"That's a Markham corridor.”

"Close,” Alex says, sounding very much like a proud parent. "It's much more complex."

Doctor Andrea Markham spearheaded the technology behind the pulse beacons. Why bore through miles of earth or moon rock to build a particle accelerator when via one elegant, albeit Byzantine calculation, you could create a Moebius interface that smashed protons in an area the size of a golf ball? Her detractors laughed at her, called it Rube-Goldberg's tiniest mail chute until Markham pinged a "Hello world" from Geneva to Mars in the fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond.

"How so?"

Alex scrunches up her face in concentration, looking so much like the real Alex that Maggie feels her insides melt. She looks away, flushed and absurd, and Alex stops and peers at her.

“This making you dizzy?”

“Yeah,” Maggie says, grateful for the excuse. 

"Sorry to do this then." She pushes the object closer until it’s right in front of her nose. "Did you know Markham took her inspiration from Gestalt theory?"

The question throws her. "I didn't. Unless I forgot that too.”

Alex smiles. “Not necessarily. Gemels come prepackaged with what Elias called an ancestral memory. His theories and inventions. Things that branched out from those creations. Markham's work is part of that. He thought providing a common origin story would help stabilize us.”

"Did it work?" Her tone is wryer than she intends. The more she learns about Alex's 'creator,' the more cartoonish his arrogance. 

Alex shrugs. "It's useful. As in now." She turns the object in the air. "See here? The ways humans visualize quantum objects have little basis in reality. Wavy lines. Spheres. These stretchy net things. They're just the forms you project to make sense of what you can’t see. Markham viewed those models as more of an impediment than an aid. Now...don't move.”

As she speaks, she slowly draws the object back from Maggie’s sightline, like an optometrist adjusting a Snellen chart. Maggie watches as the edges fade and the lines dissipate into nothingness, as the object flickers between a whole and a jumble of disparate parts.

"The law of closure," Alex says. "Markham filtered out the contour illusions projected by human sight, reimagined their forms based on how they'd appear to a more advanced consciousness. That's how she got the numbers."

"A more advanced…” Maggie starts to ask, although she really doesn’t need to, just like Alex doesn’t need to point to herself and mouth a ‘viola.’ But this Alex is in her element, excited and playful, and she's never seemed more like the one she left on Earth.

“Early prototypes." 

“Makes sense,” Maggie says.

But this is less interesting than the belated realization that Alex's vision is vastly different from her own. She can take in that illusion of the old woman and the Gibson girl all at once, without so much as a blink or a shift in perspective.

“What do you see?"

Alex worries her lip and taps some more numbers into the air. “As you said, it’s similar to a Markham corridor. Only this one doesn't traverse space. Not ours anyway."

“You mean tangent universes.”

She pushes out a breath. "A lot of them." 

"No wonder this guy wanted it quiet."

"Yep."

Maggie feels an unease ripple through her, the kind she first experienced looking through a telescope and the vastness of the universe drew up close. Her mind darts to the object on Vecher's desk, to Rudy's smug expression and that strange voice helming Traffic. She folds her hands, squeezing them together until her palms go slick. The thought surfaces as if from sleep. 

“It wasn’t an accident.”

Alex looks up. “You mean the Asona? Well, no, you couldn't--”

“No,” Maggie says. “The tunnels.”

She wants to stand up. God, how she wants to pace and let her breath and blood keep time with her thoughts. She toggles the control on the boomseat and starts a slow tour of the room. "Zofia's cost cuts were a ruse to shift the blame. Th-they wanted to cover this, whatever it us, up." She gestures to the chalkboard. “Maybe Vecher wanted it to himself, or...”

“Why destroy the Asona?”

She shakes her head. "That’s what's bothered me from the beginning. Taking out a Kyrenium shipment, even with the risk and the distance, there'd at least be a decent profit motive. But a passenger ship with miners and execs makes no sense." 

Alex tilts her head, her eyes tracking Maggie like a surveillance camera. 

"So they were targeting an individual then. Covering it up.”

"No need. Plenty of _Bratva_ out here to do the job. And doing it on LK would have been easier to hide."

"A misstep then. Overkill.”

Maggie has to snort at that. Alex knows better. With her familiarity with the ship, she knows far better than Maggie does. But she's maintaining a rhythm with her, tossing out ideas, and for that, she’s immeasurably grateful. For the first time since her groggy awakening in the medbay, her mind is racing ahead of Alex’s, hopping distances in space and time. 

Rudy.

Stephan.

The preacher who’d plucked her from the mud in Tarquin Square. When he looked at her, it was the simulation of a gaze, accounting for but not really seeing her. And his movements, gliding yet herky-jerky like he was wearing some kind of exosuit. 

She looks at Alex, thinks to measure her words, but opts against it. “Would a gemel choose to kill someone?"

Alex flinches as if she can’t quite believe what she’s hearing. “Excuse me?”

Maggie hasn’t heard of any cases. Gemel crime stats are nonexistent, a fact hammered on during the Mihara ruling, but the intricacies of their morality are hazy. She wishes she’d paid more attention.

"There's no law of robotics keeping you from offing someone. Am I right?”

"Law of robotics?” Alex's mouth goes flat. Her nostrils flare as if there’s a real set of lungs inside her. 

"You know what I mean."

"No," she says. "Enlighten me.” That look of playful discovery is gone. Alex slides off the control panel and stands so rigidly Maggie thinks she might go solid and shatter. That’s when Maggie remembers. Robot is a slur for gemels, the way toaster is for bots. 

_Fuck_

"I'm sorry, Alex. That was wrong of me."

Alex says nothing for a moment, just lets the silence tug at them both until Maggie wonders if she'll be shredded into particles like those idiots who took a joyride too close to Cygnus X-1.

"I'm sorry," she says again. She lifts her hand, pleading. "But this is important."

"I'm thinking," Alex says. 

"Okay,” Maggie whispers. "Okay."

Alex's shoulders ease, but only slightly. She leans her head back and takes in a breath. "Like any sentient being, I'm capable of violence. Like any decent one, only when and if it's absolutely necessary."

Maggie nods. "Self-defense then."

"I mean," Alex says. "There’s no need for it really. I'm not exactly killable unless you die before I’m emancipated. Even in that case, I’d just go dark until whomever you trusted with my inception code retrieved me. But if it meant saving you, or situation depending, others, I could be moved to do it.”

"And how would…" She struggles for the right words. "How would a gemel gauge that?" 

"I'm not a program, Maggie," Alex says, her tone cold enough to belie that claim. “But as a baseline? The utilitarian approach. The greater number of lives."

Maggie shakes her head. "So we're back to the fucking Trolley problem then."

The self-help version of a moral dilemma. Her worst criminal justice profs fell back on it like scripture. 

"No," Alex says. “The trolley scenario doesn’t go into the long-term ramifications of either choice. She shoots Maggie a look of well-earned self-righteousness. "A gemel _would_. It's in our nature.”

“Wish we'd had you around before the coasts sank,” Maggie says. “How long term?”

“Very,” Alex says. “I wouldn’t kill a dictator unless I was certain of saving more lives than if he lived, later generations included, and factoring in The Law of Unintended Consequences?" She shrugs. "We’re not prognosticators and I’d have to be a hundred percent certain.”

"A hundred percent."

_The few for the many._

"A passenger starship is quite a few,” Maggie says to herself.

"What?" 

"Money had nothing to do with what happened here. That might have been Vecher's motive, but someone else wanted this information erased."

“Mags, you're going to have to slow down.”

Maggie points to the object as it twists in the air between them.

"This thing is a threat. A big one judging from the number of dead. That's why the tunnels went down. But that didn’t get everyone. There were Vinkonour’s photos. Others who’d been down there to see the discovery before it collapsed. They had to clean it all up."

“That doesn’t make sense, Maggie.” Alex gives her the head tilt. “So what if a few others saw the markings? Hundreds of others even. It doesn’t mean that some miner is suddenly going to start scratching out unified field theory on a window somewhere. Most wouldn't even recognize what they were."

“They wouldn’t have to," Maggie says.

"Wait..." Alex stops. Maggie parries her with a head tilt of her own.

"What have I been trying to get you to do?"

"To access our memories." The shock spills over her features. "With Elias's tech, they could patch together a composite.”

Maggie nods, although she wishes to god it wasn’t true. “They couldn't let them reach home."

“So… what about the crew that stayed on?” Alex says. “Why not take them out too?”

"Hear anything from LK lately?” She holds Alex's gaze, watching as her stance goes rigid all over again.

“No."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this was space murder. I'm still not even sure if it makes sense. Thanks for reading.


	13. The Back and Forth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I was going to tell you.” Alex lifts a hand to silence her. “I thought it could wait until the brace was off, until you'd--”
> 
> "The brace is off, Danvers.”
> 
> "Just..." Alex closes her eyes and flicks her wrist. Maggie's jaw drops, then snaps shut tight again as a hazy image of a woman materializes in the air before her.
> 
> Right in her goddamned face.
> 
> _Hey Jim._

"What?”

Maggie’s sits up groggy in the medbay carrel, her bare legs dangling over the edge of the pallet. She had to go back under to get the brace off. The nanoshunts accelerating the healing process required surgical removal.

Alex stands in front of her, back in her lab whites for the occasion. She takes a step back, hands raised in surrender. “You’re cute when you’re groggy.”

“Am I?” Maggie drops her eyes and tugs at the paper gown sagging over her bare legs. “I doubt I smell it.”

“True.” Alex stoops to get a closer look at Maggie’s leg. Other than the gunky residue of the elastomer and a slight wrinkling of the skin, all signs of the wound are gone. Maggie shifts impatiently, presses her hand against the side table.

"You should use the drone,” Alex says. “I can’t catch you if you take a spill.”

"I’d like to do this on my own.”

“Never expected you to say that.”

“Keep talking, Danvers.” In truth, Maggie’s taken aback by her brusqueness. She should be thrilled; she’s free and finally scraping her nails across a patch of skin that’s been murdering her for days, but Alex’s proximity provokes something else inside her, the replacement of one itch for another.

Alex signals the drone anyway, sends it hovering just above Maggie’s shoulders. It’s crane arms dangle behind her like she’s some stuffy in an arcade game, and Maggie suppresses the urge to swat them away.

Alex shrugs. "Fall and you'll be back in the brace again. Don’t think we can afford that. Not now.”

They'd fired up the pulse beacon that morning, sent a coded distress signal to Para Junction. With a little luck, the U.P. would intercept it and not blow their location to LK in the process. For now, all they can do is wait, and Maggie senses that the wait will either be interminable or mercifully—or not so mercifully—quick.

Maggie closes her eyes and pushes herself up. There's a little strain, but she’s experienced as much discomfort from sleeping in the same position. She lets her weight settle before shooting a pointed look at the drone. “You can back off a little.”

The drone whirs back a few centimeters, and Maggie lifts her foot and gives a brief kick. She sees Alex watching her, her eyes drifting down to Maggie’s legs like it’s the first time she’s seen skin before. Maggie squints at her, confused and suddenly self-conscious. “Still with us, Danvers?” 

Hand steady against the table, she shifts her weight from leg to leg. The injured one’s a bit wobbly but no cramps or locking of the knees.

"How do you feel?” Alex asks. 

“Better than I thought.”

She removes her hand from the table, hears a startled chitter from the drone as she takes a step and then another. She passes Alex, crosses to the other side of the medbay, her pace gradually quickening as the drone swoops close behind her. As she walks back, a memory steps to the surface: She's six-years-old, testing a pair of sneakers on the worn carpet of a shoe store. Ruthers? Runners? One of the holdouts, housed in that abandoned roadside mall until they tore the thing down. It’s a strange shift, from here to there, now to then, and for instant, she can’t reconcile the body moving thousands of light-years from Earth from the smaller one weaving between the shoeboxes and crumpled packing paper. She takes another turn around the medbay, breath and blood pumping a semblance of hope back into her veins.

“You’re taller than I thought you’d be,” Alex says.

Maggie looks up. Alex’s gaze is still lingering on her legs, and not out of her usual protectiveness.

"Am I?" A cautious smile nudges the corners of her mouth. 

Alex catches her and just as quickly averts her eyes. “It’s…I mean I know how tall you are, but this is the first time for _me_ to see you like this.”

“Right,” Maggie says, not quite comfortable with where this is going. “How about we get back to work?”

#

Severn’s confession was too serene, a calm she’d mistaken for satisfaction. In hindsight, there’s a cultlike quality to his demeanor, his voice like water, a bleary sheen in his eyes. She’s pulled up the tunnel blueprints for another look. Maggie knows shit about architecture much less tunneling. She’d left their authentication to LK’s engineers, but Harbor’s SWOT analysis reveals that the tunnel supports, while shoddy enough, certainly weren’t on the brink of collapse. There was also the matter of where the ceiling gave, the open chamber, a vast chasm composed of Karubet Zgii, a hard mineral found in the deepest reaches of space. That wouldn’t readily collapse without a nudge.

She leans in, chin perched in hand, and peers at some of the smaller notations, the graphic symbols—a language of their own—signifying the various ducts, and lights, and exits/entrances.

“Harbor, decrypt.”

Mundane translations light up like stars over each sigil: vent, gangway, heat detector.

Then nothing. Maggie scans and then rescans a sigil near a small notation: several finlike shapes pointing off in scattered directions. It’s blurred, but not by mishap or sloppy workmanship. It’s more like those first successful photographs of quantum superposition, a wire bent back and released, its state of flux recorded as discrete images overlapping one another. And beneath it words presumably scrawled by Pitt

_This way to the motherlode._

On first glance, she assumed he’d meant the Kyrenium vein, but she now sees that the line points off from the vein and toward the open chamber. This was where the markings were discovered, where Shen Vinkonour went camera happy and sent a packet to his friend.

_You didn’t know then,_ she tells herself. _You couldn’t have._

But she feels the regret tug at her, that cold creep she gets whenever she misses something big. Sure, she was distracted by the news of Oscar’s death and was itching to get back Earthside. And she’d rationalized the lack of follow up, told herself she was just delegating mischief. Who cared who the muckraker was so long as he remained the stir up trouble? Haxen had plenty more corruption where Zofia had come from. But this, this is a miss she can’t excuse. She can only do what she can to mitigate the damage.

The motherload wasn’t the Kyrenium.

She scans his notes again.”

_They aren't going to cover this one up, Matty. When we’re done, everyone’s going to know._

A simple message that was open to interpretation, and she had jumped to the easiest possibility—the mundane one, as Oscar had taught her. Only this time, that hadn’t worked.

“What is it?”

Alex appears behind her with the drone and two mugs of Russian caravan, Maggie’s go-to for staying awake when she’s coffeed-out. Maggie takes a mug from the tray.

“Pitt. Someone I should have been paying more attention to,” she says.

“Severn’s contact?” Alex looks at her blankly and Maggie has to stifle her impatience. Alex has sharper versions of Maggie’s memories, but no reason to have pinged this if she wasn’t already working on the problem. Maggie certainly wasn’t. Her negligence is taking a toll on them both.

She runs a hand through her hair. "Take a look if you like."

Alex leans over her shoulder, peering earnestly at the screen. She’s humoring her; Alex can access this feed in an instant from anywhere on the ship, but Maggie appreciates the accommodation, even if she finds her proximity distracting.

“You see the angle now? I didn't spot it before.”

Alex goes quiet, gets that faraway look she has when she’s collating information. “So not the Kyrenium.”

“No,” Maggie says. She takes a sip; the tea is strong and unsweetened and it gives her a jolt. “I got my guy. Just not the right motive.”

“And that…” She runs a finger over the symbol. “Not a place where the ink got wet.”

“Nope.”

“The pixilation has a different watermark.” She draws back.

“You think he knew?” Maggie says. “Do you think this was more than him pointing out shoddy construction?”

Alex doesn’t answer. She folds her arms, fingers drumming silently against her sleeves.

“Knew it.”

No response. Maggie puts her mug down. She’s glad she did because Alex is pale, like some breathless swimmer who’s only now realized she’s over a drop off.

“Maggie, something came in on the pulse while you were under.”

Maggie turns fast in the boomseat, watches as Alex jerks back, not fast enough to miss her. Maggie’s legs swipe through hers. They overlap each other like water.

“What do you mean something came through?”

“I was going to tell you.” Alex lifts a hand to silence her. “I thought it could wait until the brace was off, until you'd—”

"The brace _is_ off, Danvers.”

"Just..." Alex closes her eyes and flicks her wrist. Maggie's jaw drops, then snaps shut tight again as a hazy image of a woman materializes in the air before her.

Right in her goddamned face.

_Hey Jim._

_We know you’re hurting. We get it. We heard and we’re hurting, too…_

It’s her.

Alex’s wife.

Just as she appeared on the wedding invitation Maggie had torn up and sent scattering from the window. On the pictures Maggie called up on her feed during the one night of drunken wallowing she'd allowed herself. 

She’s just like she imagines her. Buttoned up, oozing goodness, and infuriatingly beautiful.

And scared.

_We love you, James. None of us is going to forget her. So, j-just don’t do it... I can’t be clear on this thing as it could make things worse for you. I only hope that you understand. I only hope it’s not true and when you get this message, you’ll laugh your laugh and tell me I’m back on my bullshit again._ _I don’t have much time. Had to pull some serious strings to hack the pulse feed, but James. Jim. if it’s true and you do know what I’m talking about, we love you. All of us are waiting for you. So, please. Don’t._ _I know you say that the truth, that information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. And you're right. You've always been right. But not about this._

_You owe me a 'trust me on this one' remember?_

_Trust me._

Maggie pushes back in her seat. “What is this, Danvers?” Her voice is shaking. “What the fuck is this?”

She’s never felt angrier or more stridently self-righteous, like the Maggie who started all of her and Alex’s worst fights. She’d rarely been on the right side of history then, so she forces herself to breathe for a moment.

“She’s talking to him, isn’t she?” Alex says. “Pitt? That’s got to be him.”

Maggie keeps her eyes on the floor, her fists are clenched tight enough to snap. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought it would upset you."

"It _does_."

“It upset me, too.”

“Did it?”

_Fuck._

Maggie forces her eyes up long enough to confirm the name on the readout.

Kelly Maria Olsen.

Not Danvers-Olsen or Olsen-Danvers, or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves now. Not that it matters anyway.

That’s not her life anymore.

Her life is this purgatory and Kelly fucking Olsen has once again placed herself smack in the middle of it.

 _Weren’t you happy?_ she wants to say. _Had to chase me all the way out here?_

Maybe this is an illusion. Maybe she's really back in Central Hub, the hull shattering around her, her soon-to-be corpse tumbling out into the black. But she knows it isn’t. She knows this because she is her, and this is what her reality hands her like tissue packets on a Tokyo street.

"He’s her brother then," Maggie says.

She knew very little about Kelly, the less the better. She avoided talk of her when her colleagues, who sometimes crossed paths with her or Alex at that clinic, had offered it.

Maggie always snapped, told them she didn't want to hear it. 

Not any of it.

Ever.

“Confirmed.” Alex is shaking like some frightened kid after a major fuck up.

"What can you give me on him?”

"Only the passenger dossier, and what Harbor’s got from old news files. No instantaneous feed. James Bartholomew Olsen, 38. Up-and-coming journalist on Earth about ten years ago. Bylines in _The Planet_ and _The Gotham Ledger_. Resigned from a staff position after he wrote an op-ed about a mining accident in Calvintown, full on workers of the world unite kind of thing. You want me to read it to you?”

“Not now.”

“A few pieces here and there, on the resource wars in Ukraine, one on mining practices and radiation sickness on Io. But that was five years ago."

“That’s our guy. If he was on board, then...”

Maggie drags her eyes to the frozen image of Kelly, feels a brief pang of sympathy for her loss before she shoves it back down again.

“Where’d _she_ come from?”

“Bounce assist. Origin point. Earth. Delayed transmission at Shuntshen 22b.

“How long of a delay?”

“No data.”

“Do you think she knows?” Alex says. She gestures to the blueprints. “Is that what this is about?”

Maggie looks at the feed signature. “Maybe. This looks like a bounce off a U.P. channel. Likely someone in the know put her up to it. Guy was a stubborn piece of work if they went to these lengths.”

Maggie worries her lip and reaches for the tea again. She takes another sip, relieved that some of the burn has died down. “But how would they have known? Unless chalkboard tipped someone big off to Vinkonour’s message?” Alex looks fraught with regret.

"I'm sorry.” Alex reaches out, places her hand in the space where Maggie’s rests , still clenched, on her knee. “I shouldn’t have waited.”

Maggie snorts. “This after you forced me to talk out all that trauma.”

Maggie looks at her, sees that warring desire to either flee or blow everything up, and it hits her. It wasn’t Alex who’d kept this message from her, but herself. This Alex is formed from Maggie’s psyche, has her memories and experiences, but by her own inception date, she’s a colt: wobbly and uncertain, running to the same coping mechanisms Maggie availed herself of on the regular before human Alex freed her of the habit. This Alex was keeping secrets because Maggie kept secrets, pushing down the hard stuff out of some misguided desire to protect her.

“I thought maybe you’d had enough,” Alex says. She’s staring at their hands now, that awkward approximation of intimacy, and Maggie does either the dumbest or most mature thing she’s done in a long time. She turns her wrist so that her palm is facing Alex’s and opens her hand into the glow of her fingers.

“I had,” she says. “But you and me? We’ve got issues. A lot of them.”

Alex nods. “I know.”

“And it’s dangerous,” Maggie says. “We need to put a stop to this suffering in silence shit.”

Alex lifts her gaze. She looks so sad and yet so full of hope that Maggie wants to pull her close, to hold her until only the latter remains.

But all she has are words.

Alex’s words.

_You don’t need to be guarded with me._

She needs to find her own. She lifts a hand to touch this Alex’s face, the loose approximation of a caress. “I’m here for you.”

She leaves off that last part. This isn’t the time for reserve.

#

Later, they take supper amid the emptiness of the banquet hall. Alex has opened the sun shield to full view of the Lutra Nebula and ordered up renditions of Maggie’s childhood favorites: Matilde’s feijoada and tiramisu for dessert. Maggie’s brought in a single hovering glowsphere, usually used for repairs, and placed it above the center of the table. It gives off a warm light, softening the sterile illumination on the ship. Tomorrow, they’ll be back in work mode, sifting passenger dossiers, listening to the feeds from the pulse beacon and LK, hoping that someone from the U.P. will send word. May as well enjoy this time before the uncertainty sets in.

There’s music, a playlist so random, Maggie has no idea how or if Alex chose the music, only that she likes it—and that each song, if not familiar, is vaguely resonant of her past.

“I thought you could indulge a little,” Alex says. The drone places an open and very expensive bottle of merlot in front of her. “You haven’t tried this yet,” she says. “But the taste profile matches your preferences.”

“Guess I can keep you around,” Maggie says and instantly regrets it. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean to imply that I’d--”

“It’s fine,” Alex says.

“I’ll emancipate you first thing when we get back,” Maggie says. “That was never a question.”

“You don’t want to keep me?” Alex’s eyes are laughing, but there’s a hint of worry in her tone.

“I-I like having you with me. But you should be free to make that decision on your own.”

Alex smiles. “Thank you.” She leans over her wine glass and closes her eyes. “I do think you’ll like this one.”

Maggie puts the glass to her lips and plunges back to Earth and the smell of cedar, to the taste of freshly picked blackberries on her tongue. There’s a memory in there, too. It’s early on with Alex and they’ve stopped at a café near California’s truncated coastline, one of those establishments that either through a lack of funds or just plain stubbornness refuses move inland. The devastation on those shores was, _is_ still, relentless.

“People used to see people, maybe a ship or two, when they talked ghosts,” Alex said. “Now it’s lost homes, old motels, and amusement parks along the boardwalk.”

Alex had lost hers, that near mansion by the sea she used to talk about. That was why they’d gone; Alex was taking her around what remained of her childhood. Just like Maggie, she didn’t have one anymore.

“My mom was devastated,” she told her. “That place was in the family for four generations. She didn’t want to sell it, but my Dad convinced her it was for the best. And he was right. A few years later, the storms started up in earnest.”

"You all right?" this Alex asks. Maggie drifts back, downs more of the liquid along with the nascent recognition of how little she'd done to acknowledge Alex's loss. She'd been resentful of her privilege, of her ease at fancy colleague dinners, the inconspicuous to the point of drab decor in her apartment.

"Yeah," Maggie says. Her voice is laced with regret, so she smiles to compensate and gestures to the spread in front of her. "Thanks for this. It’s nice to have a break.”

They sit in silence for a moment, the soft strains of music floating in the air around them. Some old ballad. Maggie can't remember the name, but she flashes back to her parents’ house. She’s huddled on the landing, looking between the bars in the banister as her parents, still young, still in like if not in love, slow dance in the living room.

_You’re a cowboy like me, perched in the dark, telling all the rich folks anything they wanna hear…_

"What's it like?" Alex asks.

Maggie blinks at her. Alex seems to know just what memory this song’s pulled up from her psyche. “To spy on my parents?"

"To dance.”

"You don't know?"

Alex presses a hand to her chest. "I do. In here. I know how your body felt doing it, but not how it feels in this one."

Maggie gazes down at her leg. She’s good for it, but it's been a long time regardless. "Promise to go easy on me?"

She pushes herself up and turns, woozy from the wine, but happy to be moving, sliding her feet across the hall’s silvery parquet. She stretches and gazes up at the nebula, that luminescent spiral that is either the dust from a dying sun or the starlit loam of new beginnings. “Got to take advantage of a backdrop like this. C’mere.”

Alex rises and comes forward. She stands in front of Maggie, her arms at her sides as if she expects her to lift them for her, but Maggie just smiles and narrows the space between them, slips her arms around the circumference of Alex's waist. One hand cuts through the dark folds of Alex’s shirt, through that illusion of flesh and bone, but Alex doesn’t flinch, and Maggie feels only air and warmth against her fingers. It's the proximity that hits her. Alex’s face is so close to hers, her eyes following Maggie's like they’re homing in on truth.

"Don't think I've had a partner this light on her feet,” she says.

Alex lifts her arms slightly, only so it looks like Maggie's aren't impaling her own. The sway of their bodies is cautious, slight enough to be imperceptible, but Maggie feels her heart knocking against that stillness. She might be holding a phantom, but she’s never felt more afraid of her own clumsiness, of elbowing a stomach or stepping on a foot. She leans in, lowering her chin over the outline of Alex's shoulder and closes her eyes. Alex’s warmth, her familiar musk mixed with the scent of her soap drifts between them, and she can almost feel it. _Her._

If she stays this way, maybe the empty space will fill itself, maybe she’ll feel the press of Alex’s hands on her back, the warmth of her breath on her neck.

"I'm sorry,” Alex whispers.

Maggie pulls back and looks at her. There’s a rawness in Alex’s expression. “For what?” 

“This.” She’s looking down like she knows she’s not enough, will never be enough. 

“Hey,” Maggie whispers. “You don’t have anything to feel sorry for. This...this is the best time I’ve had since forever.” She moves in to comfort her and meets…resistance.

_How?_

She chokes out a laugh as her fingers meet skin, as they tangled in the silky texture of auburn hair. Alex’s hair.

“Alex?”

“Shh.” Alex presses a finger to her lips. “Don’t think about it. It will fade if you think about it.”

"This isn't—” She’s cut off by lips, soft and warm and urgent against her own, by the shock of cool hands sliding beneath the folds of her shirt. Alex shoves her newfound solidity against her and Maggie, lost now, snakes her arm tightly around her neck. She pulls her closer, their mouths still locked. She can feel Alex’s breath inside her, taste the wine on her lips. This can’t be real. It isn’t. But she’s been so alone for so long, long before she left Earth when she was with the Alex who wanted other things. She’s shaking her head even as her hand slides lower, dips beneath the waistline of this Alex's trousers. Material that was once intangible gives way with the same ease. Alex buries her face in Maggie’s neck. Her lips are warm and wet against her skin. “I wanted to touch you,” she says. “I wanted to feel you and now...”

Maggie’s breath hitches in her throat.

_No, no, no._

Maggie tries to pull away, but one look in those warm brown eyes and she sinks again. She covers Alex’s mouth with hers and this time, the kiss is breathless.

If Maggie didn’t need to breathe, it might just last forever.

But she does.

She bolts up in the darkness, the taste of the wine still on her lips. She’s in her quarters, the blankets are thrown about as if a hurricane has torn through the room.

“What was it?” She presses her hand to her chest. Her skin feels seared but it's clammy to the touch.

Alex stands over the bed, fully clothed. Her face is a mask, taut but devoid of emotion.

“Maggie?” 

"Danvers?" Maggie lurches forward, hurriedly yanking one of the blankets back over her. Her expression is a billboard for fear and embarrassment. “What are you doing here?”

If Alex intuits Maggie’s dream, she clearly doesn’t have time for it.

"We've got company."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be typos galore, but damn it feels good to be writing in big chunks rather than the sprints of the last six months.  
> This is the "oldie" playing in Maggie's parents' living room. Less than two weeks in our time. Relativity, eh?  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPlNBb6I8qU


	14. This Part of the Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What about those?” Maggie eyes a pair of EVA-equipped loaders near the docking ramp, two monstrous, baleful husks casting crooked shadows over the floor grates. “Give me an hour and I can get the hang of it.”
> 
> Alex shakes her head. “Charge will throw up shrapnel. Puncture your suit or worse. It’ll have to be me.”
> 
> Maggie rears back a little. “Loaders don’t have minds. They’re patched directly through to the brainstem.”
> 
> Alex snorts and pulls up a diagram, all gimbals and power hubs and series of crystals interlocked with intricate gears. “Wire in the drone mind, and I can gain control of the suit.”
> 
> “Remotely?”
> 
> “Won’t work. The visual hook up with the drone would be fuzzy at best.” She looks down, one foot worrying the tile as if she’s trying to nudge her thoughts into place. “I’ll need to be out there.”

  


“We’ve got company.”

Maggie shakes off the dream. If Alex knows what’s in her head, she doesn’t show it. She’s far too scared.

She tugs on a shirt, fumbling with the drawstrings on her trousers as she hurries after her to the control room. Alex doesn’t need to explain; a slow pan over the navigational display to that lone dot inching across it tells her everything she needs to know. 

Alex's eyes are following it like she’s watching a wreck of her own making. “I’m sorry.”

“How much time do we have?”

Alex’s face falls as she calculates. “Normally three weeks, but it’s a self-defense transport with a VASIMR-12 propulsion system.” 

A gunboat. Used to escort Kyrenium freighters.

“At their current rate, 72-hours.”

Maggie nods and sinks into the boomseat, still trailing her around like a pup. 

A sudden wave of exhaustion hits her, despite the rapid thrum of her pulse, like some part of this is welcome, an answer to her not-so-subconscious desire to burn everything to the ground. If it was just her, she might grab a bottle and hail the bastards before helming what Petal’s got left of its ionizer cannons. 

But as her gaze rises to meet Alex’s, she sees every reason that she shouldn’t. 

Gemels are free-floating quantum systems, but they require a power source to keep them viable. If she dies, Alex will go dark and remain out here in stasis until the generators go on the ship—and that’s if their visitors don’t blow it up on sight. Maggie’s made peace with losing herself. Losing this better angel of her nature is out of the question. 

“We can send out another distress call,” Alex says as if in answer. “It doesn’t matter now that LK’s spotted us.”

“Will it make a difference?”

“No.”

Maggie scoots up to the console, brings up a diagram of the loading dock. “We’ll take a pod, get far enough away from Petal 4 before they get here.”

“Out here?” 

Maggie sees something close to anguish in Alex’s expression, like she’s calculating their chances as Maggie speaks. “We’ll have three months of life support. We can stretch it to a year, maybe more if I go under.” 

That’s pushing it. The pods in Petal 4 are built for more populated spots along interstellar trade routes where you’d have a chance of being picked up. Out here, they’re a formality.

“That’s suicide.” A tiny spasm tugs at her lips, and Maggie has the sudden urge to hold her or at least put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but all she’s got are words. “If I don’t make it, the power source and the comms will stay online for years. We can set up a beacon. I can leave a will, instructions to revive you Earthside and emancipate you.”

Alex’s face is tight. She lifts a hand, fingers outstretched as if to make some grand argument, but the words stagger out of her. “I’m...I’m supposed to protect you.” 

Maggie reaches out, gropes pointlessly for a hand and meets air. She another step closer, tilting her head so that Alex is forced to look her in the eye. “Hey,” she says, slowly lifting her hand to the space where Alex’s heart is. “Alex? You _are._ I’m still in here. That’s not going to change.”

Alex squeezes her eyes shut, nods fitfully as if the air around her has thickened into frost. “But I already have.”

“Alex…” Maggie touches a knuckle to her cheek, feels that warmth that comforts her more than it does Alex. 

“I wish we had more time,” Alex says, making a brave effort to smile. “I wouldn’t have minded another dance and the pod’s too small.”

Maggie blinks up at her. She hasn’t even begun to sift the real bits from that hazy, animal dream. Drama is for later, for another time and place where they’ll have that luxury. All she knows is that Alex has more of her foolishness stored in her memory, so she smiles and owns whatever it is. 

“So do I.”

She pulls her hand away and sees the glint on her finger.

Moisture.

The bead rolls off her skin, elongating like a raindrop as it falls and hits the floor.

They both step back to give this thing space between them, to confirm what they’ve just seen, but it’s already fading, evaporating in the ventilated chamber. 

“Condensation,” Alex says, but as she does, she draws a hand to her face to make sure.

#

The pods are in the port side of Petal 4, stacked like oversized wine casks and prepped for launch were it not for a chunk of heatshield blocking the evac chute. That entire side of the petal took a hit in the blast. More explosives risk damaging the pods, and with what they’ve got on hand, trying to cut it away would be like chipping at a glacier with toothpick.

Alex pulls up a 3-D image of the hull, the torn shield arcing out over the chute like one of those waves in Japanese woodblock prints. “Most metals go brittle in the annealing process,” she says. “The heat shield, however, is a synthesis of Cerulean and steel, which maintains a certain level of malleability to keep it from breaking up. That’s why this fucker didn’t just snap off in the blast.” She pings the tip of her finger across different points along the surface. “So, heat won’t work, but if we wire nanite fluxers along these vectors, we can still induce molecular dislocation.”

Maggie leans close, takes in the pattern crisscrossing the blockage. “Nerdspeak, Danvers.”

Alex lifts her chin, gives the first genuine smile since waking Maggie up that morning. “Massage it in the sweet spots until it bends to our will. Problem is in the bending. We need a lot of strength and the tugboats went up with Central Hub. Drone doesn’t have the muscle for it.”

“What about those?” Maggie eyes a pair of EVA-equipped loaders near the docking ramp, two monstrous, baleful husks casting crooked shadows over the floor grates. “Give me an hour and I can get the hang of it.”

Alex shakes her head. “Charge will throw up shrapnel. Puncture your suit or worse. It’ll have to be me.”

Maggie rears back a little. “Loaders don’t have minds. They’re patched directly through to the brainstem.”

Alex snorts and pulls up a diagram, all gimbals and power hubs and series of crystals interlocked with intricate gears. “Wire in the drone mind, and I can gain control of the suit.”

“Remotely?”

“Won’t work. The visual hook up with the drone would be fuzzy at best.” She looks down, one foot worrying the tile as if she’s trying to nudge her thoughts into place. “I’ll need to be out there.”

She looks at Maggie almost as if she expects a challenge. Gemel can access networks and systems, but are tightly blocked from merging with anything resembling a human body. To protect them from exploitation, or so Elias’s reasoning went. It was far more likely that he feared it would be like handing dolphins gift baskets of opposable thumbs. Bots stayed soulless and gemels remained ghosts, but there was Schireli’s gemel, walking through the rain, swaddled up in that oversized coat. 

Alex looks at Maggie, her expression evincing a certainty she’s kept hidden.

Is that collective memory Elias installed something they’re adding to? Are they storing up tricks for an insurrection? And can she blame them if they are?

“Nice workaround,” she says.

Alex shrugs in response. “Our makers overlook things.”

#

In the beginning, she and Alex gave each other space. They ducked and jabbed, playing aloof when all they wanted to do was sequester themselves in a hotel room and let the rest of the world fall away. But in their line of work it was inevitable: the excitement and life-threatening events that spiked the adrenalin and rendered conviction to feelings, confessions, and a well-earned descent into happily ever after. 

But Maggie never wanted what lay on the other side of the slope; she saw no reason she and Alex couldn’t stay in the rising action. Being queer freed you up, after all. You could remain—for as long as your body and mind allowed-- in the parts of a story that made you feel most alive. 

_I love you._

__

__

_Forever._

Ludicrous, once you’d been out here long enough.

Around her the stars form a uniform pattern; only the recurring flare of the nebula alerts her to the spin of the craft. This time, she can see the beauty in this cold light of other suns. She can see why her Alex loved it, why her eyes lit up when she talked of her time outside.

_You’ll never feel so unimportant yet so essential to the whole._

No epiphanies, but this second time out isbetter. She’s more confident, climbing hand over hand along the hull, lifting her legs like a gymnast to lock her boots to Petal 4’s blackened surface. She presses the final strip of nanite fluxer in place, then pushes back, allowing some slack on her tether to take in their handiwork. 

“What do you think, Danvers?”

Alex stands above her, a preening Superhero astride a skyscraper window. “All good.” Her voice is thin through the comm, with none of the breathy humanity she can fake in an atmosphere. 

She’d was clumsy in the suit at first, clomping about the loading dock like a drunken herd animal. She broke things and sent a stack of supply crates into the wall hard enough to dent it. Maggie coached her, made her walk laps around the deck, practice lifting and climbing in the gravity-free chamber. She’d lumbered alongside Maggie as she placed the fluxers, tethering the cables to the blockage, climbing down that jagged slope until she was at a safe enough distance.

She gives a tug to the coil, looking very much like a charioteer holding back a team of wild horses, then floats out of the suit to confirm the placement of the fluxers. At this moment, Maggie thinks, she’s like one of those angels the early cosmonauts encountered before they were carted off and erased from official photographs. Maggie understands. It’s so hard not to lose yourself.

“We’re ready,” she says. “You should go.” She dips her head up to the black and Maggie follows her sightline, sees nothing.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“See you back in the pod, Danvers.”

She should know that such confident partings come with bad luck, but her swagger gets the better of her all the same.

#

Inside, Maggie pulls up the console and readies the charge. One surge of energy will set the fluxers into action, sending their nanites burrowing into the heat shield and warping it into toffee.

“Ready?” 

The wave is a mountain through Alex’s viewscreen[.](https://prowritingaid.com/en/Analysis/WebEditor/) “Fire up,” she says.

Maggie sets the charge, her body tensing as a low groan reverberates through the hull. She watches through Alex’s viewscreen as a line across the bulk pulsates, the metal shifting and molten in that unforgiving cold. 

The viewscreen shakes as Alex, with the force of the suit takes a few jerky steps backward and pulls. 

“Just like a pull tab,” Maggie says. “You remember those, don’t you, Danvers?”

“Blue Nehi,” Alex says. The taste of Maggie’s childhood summers. “How did you ever like that stuff?”

“Thought it was your favorite color.”

“Her favorite,” Alex corrects her. There’s a low rumble as the metal starts to warp and twist. “You know.” She takes another step back and grunts. “Blue really doesn’t suit her.”

Maggie breaks into a grin. “Someone had to say it, and it wasn't going to be me.” The laughter dies in her throat as she sees that slab bending back, the wave now in retreat.

“How far back am I?” Alex says. 

“You’re good,” Maggie says. She checks the monitor on the outer hatch. “All clear. I’m going to cut the charge. Hold it steady until it sets. We’ve still got plenty of time.”

Maggie waits, listening to the simulation of Alex’s breath as the shimmer across the mass dissipates and hardens. Then she asks, “what’s yours?”

“What’s what?”

“Your favorite color?”

“All of them,” Alex says. 

“I like that.” She does like that. Alex is so new to the world, despite being burdened with Maggie’s memories. She doesn’t need to be burdened with her or Alex’s tastes. “Okay, Danvers. You can let go.”

Alex releases the cables, watches as they coil away from the ship. The tsunami stays in place, cresting over Alex like a row of jagged teeth. 

They take a long moment to admire their work. Maybe too long. There’s a burst of static on Alex’s viewscreen.

“Mags?” 

“Yeah?”

“Time to get in the pod.”

Maggie glances up just as Alex leans back, reveals something coming into view in the black. There’s a pinprick of light in the distance and it’s growing larger as they speak. She checks the navigational display, at that slow blip still crawling toward them. Not them but approaching from the same direction. 

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Maggie…” Her voice is breaking up. “Get i… th… od. Now. M…ggie….Gu..I…shhhrr.”

Maggie dons her helmet as she climbs the ladder and lifts herself, legs first into Pod 10. The angle and the cramped space are disorienting: Two seats and two coffins, built for deep sleep. Everything else is taken up by supplies.

“I’m in.” She tugs the straps around her shoulders, then flips through the sequence for the atmosphere regulator. “Time for you to join me, babe.” That last word slips from her, helpless and stupid as she punches in the launch code. Alex should have ditched the suit by now, she should have already slipped through that hull and be hovering by Maggie’s side. 

“Maggie.” Alex’s breath is slow and rhythmic, like she’s trying making an effort to sound calm.

“Hey, Danvers. Talk to me.”

More silence, longer this time save for Harbor’s maddeningly serene countdown.

_Launch sequence initiated. Opening portal._

“I’ve…I’ve got some interference,” Alex says. “Something’s—”

There’s a flash on the viewscreen, a burst of light so bright yet so pale, Maggie can stare right into it without squinting.

“Maggie! Go!”

She’s gulping back air, panic lacing through her veins. She’d rather die than be alone again like this, out here in this awful blue-black of forever.

“I don’t know what will happen if you’re not in range.” Her hands waver over the launch button. “You’ve got to—”

“G…” The word dies in the ether as a tremor bounces the pod from the slipway. 

She slams forward and punches the ignition, thrown back as the thrusters roar and the black looms larger in her viewscreen. The pod knocks the side of the chute on its way out, and she thinks it’s over until the stars streak across the porthole, milky lines of a violent spin. Her vision’s blurring, the controls are smears of green and red in front of her. “Come on, babe. Ride’s waiting.”

There’s another blast, knocking her back and sending her into the darkness. Alex’s name is on her lips.

#

Human Alex appointed herself as Maggie’s carer. She dressed her wounds, rubbed salve into the bruises she’d gotten during flights or falls, but there was only one time things got serious. 

A raid on a cartel in Shin-Osawa. They’d caught the men before they could go for their weapons, but one of them landed a blow to Maggie’s solar plexus. She doesn’t remember much pain, just falling backward as the air left her, the taste of blood mingling with the acrid scent of gunpowder on her tongue. Then she was on her back, Alex and a nurse rushing her through a narrow corridor. Alex was talking to her, but Maggie’s ears weren’t taking in the sound right. Everything was mired together; the call chimes and the voices, the clack of wheels underneath were like colors smeared across a canvass. Alex lips moved in fast-forward even as the nurse, tethered in her own orbit, bobbed with arduous slowness by her side. She doesn’t know what Alex said, but she’s pretty certain it was the turning point. 

That first whisper of their need to slow down. Stop even. 

Two weeks later, Alex brought Maggie home to a brightly remodeled apartment, simplicity replaced by an earthy hominess inviting clutter and false cheer.

Alex didn’t say anything at first. She fed Maggie her favorites, frequently botched homecooked meals of vegan lasagna and couscous, and stayed sadistic about the whiskey ration. Maggie knew it wasn’t about her recovery. Alex was a bioengineer, and this was its own kind of engineering. She was tinkering with the life they’d shared, trying to shape it into something less volatile, safer and more staid. In short, a place where their story ended--at least as far as stories were concerned.

She opens her eyes to stillness. The room is dark, but someone’s standing over her. She opens her mouth, gasping as she feels the cool press of a palm against her forehead. She reaches up, groping for that hand, fingers brushing against the rough sleeve of a uniform.

“Did…” Her mouth is dry and heavy. She can barely get the words out, but she tries to push herself up. “Did I make it?”

“Shh. It’s okay.”

_That voice._

A hand presses at her collar bone, pushes her gently back down on the bed. Maggie reaches up, fingers meeting the soft, familiar contours of a cheek. “I didn’t make it, did I?”

“Maggie.”

“I didn’t make it. And I'm glad I didn't because you're still here."

She lurches up again and pulls her to her. “I can feel you.” Alex goes still, but doesn’t push her away. Maggie presses her face into hair that smells like yuzu and forest, her fingers finding a waiting pulse. She’s weeping now, her body wracked with relief. “Don’t leave me out there again. You're here. You're here. You're here.” She rocks against her repeating it again and again. A mantra keeping this body in place.

Alex takes her hand, her fingers locking with her own, but not in reassurance. There’s only force as it draws her away from that warmth. She sets her hand on the bed like an object best not toyed with. 

“Maggie?" she says. "Do you know where you are?”

"I'm with you. You're here. You're--"

Alex switches on the light and Maggie flinches in the antiseptic brightness. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

Alex.

Alex Danvers sits at her side, her eyes etched with concern and confusion. “You’re in shock.”

Her air is shorter and slicked back and there’s a small scar on her upper right cheek from a shrapnel burst or a knife. She offers a smile, more pacifying than cordial.

“Shock...” Maggie says. She takes in the shoulder boards, the insignia of a U.P. captain on her collar. “Where are we?”

“The U.P. Frigate Adler.”

“Petal 4,” Maggie says. She feels herself sinking, like something’s trying to pull her down through the hull. “The Asona.” 

Alex hesitates then gives a slow shake of her head. “They took it out before we got to them. We barely got to you. I’m sorry. Were there others? We didn’t pick up any—”

“No.” Maggie’s shuddering, her mind is trying to race through fog. “Harbor’s motherboard. Did you transfer the data?”

“There wasn’t time.”

A throat clears behind her causing Alex to stiffen even more and frown. She forces her mouth into a flat line as Maggie follows her gaze to a reedy woman standing bunched up and tense in the doorway.

“I thought you might need me here,” she says.

_Kelly._

“No. I’m good." Alex turns back to Maggie, brow creased in irritation. "Thank you.”

Maggie grabs Alex’s wrist. “The pod…did you check the pod…” Her teeth are chattering. “She’s in there and you need to find her.”

Alex pulls her hand away and clasps Maggie by the shoulders, her face is pained like she thinks she might break her. 

“Is she here? She's got to be.”

“Is _who_ here?”

“You...”

“Me?”

“No.”

Kelly steps forward. “What’s she on about?”

“Not now,” Alex says. She turns back to Maggie, her eyes narrowed. “I’m going to give you another sedative. Just sit back.”

The room starts to spin. Maggie tries to sit up again but that damned woman has come over and has her by the arm. She's strong, too. Like she could toss Maggie over a shoulder if she wanted.

“Should I call someone?” Kelly says. 

“I would have done that already.” Alex’s voice could lop off a head, but Kelly keeps talking, spewing jargon about hallucinations and deep space psychosis.

Alex pressing the tip of the pneumatic syringe to her neck, wincing as she pushes it in. Maggie seizes up and then the edges of the world start to soften. 

“She's here.” She’s not even sure if they can hear her now. They’ve both turned away, distracted by something, and Maggie sees their mouths drop as if they’ve just dosed themselves with something stronger.

"Who?"

“Danvers," Maggie whispers. Not Alex. Not this Alex, but that Alex. _Her_ Alex.

This Alex backs up, one hand over her blaster. She shoves herself between the apparition and the bed, her other arm splayed out protectively.

That Alex smiles, as if this is all just a simple mix up-- two black umbrellas getting numbered wrong in a coat room. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” 

If Maggie had the breath, she’d burst out laughing. That Alex almost does, but she’s far too kind to make light of such confusion. Instead, she gives an apologetic nod to Kelly and walks right through her twin, through the bed post and then the bed like she's slicing her way through the mattress. She steps away and takes a place near Maggie’s pillow. A smirk crosses Kelly’s features.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“I’m afraid not,” that Alex says. “And no deep space psychosis either.” She holds a hand over Maggie’s forehead, bathing her in the warm glow of her aura. “It’s real.” She leans over Maggie and smiles. “I’m real. And you need to listen to your ex. Sleep."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a challenging exercise if anything. Space is hard.


	15. Fox in Stasis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They told me you’d intercepted his communique.”
> 
> “They?”
> 
> “Your… companion,” Alex says.
> 
> Maggie’s got the T-shirt halfway over her head. She stops, arms raised, the cloth pressing down against her face. The room is tinged gray through the mesh.
> 
> “Her name is Alex.”

_We suffer equally this parting:_

_It is dark, and it is lasting._

_Why weep? Give me your hand._

_Promise to come again in dreamland._

_You and I are like grief upon dearest grief…_

_In this world, for us, there can be no meeting._

_Just send me in the small hours,_

_via the stars,_

_A greeting._

Anna Akhmatova

Alex, human Alex, stands before what passes for a window, a display of shifting images from outside—stars, nebulae, a few of the glittering stones tumbling in the Alkwaii belt. She hears Maggie stir in her bed and turns stiffly, her hands clasped behind her. “You’re awake.”

Not quite, but at this point Maggie wonders if she’s ever woken up. She feels around, fingers grazing obscenely soft sheets, testing the weight of real blankets. She’s not in the medbay anymore. These quarters are military issue, but spacious. There’s a full kitchenette stocked with sundries from home, coffee, expensive liquor and spices,and a cannister of steel-cut oats. Tea roses sit in a vase on a small dining table, their scent battling the funk of ozone and burning oil that permeates these ships. 

“I had you moved here,” Alex says, and Maggie eyes the worn Pendleton blanket draped loosely over her chest. How many times had they fought over it on those rare chilly nights in the city? “We’ll need beds freed up in the medbay, and I know what it’s like waking up far from home.”

Maggie pushes herself up, spies the photo of the old Victorian atop an eroding sea cliff, and sets her expression on neutral. “I’ve been doing it long enough. I hope I’m not putting you out.”

Alex gives a slight shrug. “Kelly’s letting me stay with her,” she says, and Maggie can’t help but notice that she’s watching her for a reaction. When it doesn’t come, she shies her gaze away again. “Beats the barracks on D Deck.”

So they’ve split.

Or maybe it’s just a prolonged and complicated spat? She doesn’t ask. 

There are more important questions. 

“Where is she?”

Alex looks at her, almost mechanically. “Kelly?” 

“No.”

Alex draws into herself, nodding slowly and processing Maggie’s answer slower than an antique modem. She meets her again with what she hopes is a level expression. “They’re being debriefed. As will you as soon as you’re feeling up to it.” She takes a few steps closer to the bed, her stance self-consciously rigid, and Maggie detects a hardness that wasn’t there before. “I imagine this must be a surprise,” she says.

“I think we’ve got each other on that point,” Maggie says. There’s a portable water dispenser by her bedside, and she takes a cup and presses it under the spigot. She’s parched, for water and for words. The o2 on these ships is treated with shoddy military issue filters that give it an acrid odor, but she downs it and gets another, in part to buy time. She’s watching this Alex, trying to fit these hard edges into the shape of hazier, more pliant memories. 

Alex pulls a chair away from the dining table and lowers herself into it. The bars on her uniform glint amber in the diffused light. “You want to go first?”

It’s a leap at their old intimacy, letting the context swirl thick and silent around so very few words, but this Alex isn’t Alex she remembers. She’s playing at her though, so stiff and uncertain.

“Not really,” Maggie says, forcing some gentleness into her voice. “How did you get here so quickly?”

There’s a slight twitch in Alex’s cheek and she lifts a finger to touch the scar there. It’s deeper than Maggie thought, and she wonders briefly why she didn’t have it removed. Is it meant to impart toughness? To intimidate the recalcitrant among her crew? Or is it something she won’t let herself forget?

“We were en route,” Alex says. “We intercepted your beacon at Io Flipstation.”

“To LK?” If they were already on the way, the situation is far more serious than either she or gemel Alex have imagined.

Alex regards her silently for a moment, as if she’s gauging her trustworthiness. “The Adler isn’t alone, Maggie. We’re part of a fleet.”

The change in scope floors her, even if she’s been expecting it. Maggie tugs off the blanket and swings her legs over the side of the bed. The room tilts a little as she stands. She’s tired of this, her reality shifting every damned time she wakes up. Alex pitches forward in her chair, ready to steady her. 

“I’m fine,” Maggie says. “Keep talking.” Alex hasn’t touched her, but this negotiation with her physical counterpart is already twisting her insides. She can lean on this Alex if she falls, but rely on her? She got that answer a long time ago.

Alex runs a nervous hand through her hair. “Two years ago, Kelly came to me for help. Her brother was mixed up in trouble in the outer colonies.” She lets out a single, humorless laugh. “A conspiracy involving the Haxen Mining Company and Kyrenium. I didn’t listen. I _should_ have.” She smiles, her eyes distant. “Kelly had a million stories about James. There was always some cause he’d taken up, and I… by that time things between us …” She stops and there’s a hint of something painful in her expression. “I thought she was trying to lure me back.”

Alex meets Maggie’s gaze, her eyes seeking the hard connection forged through softer memories, but Maggie can't hold it. Already that feeling is returning, that same icy trickle of hope. 

“Where is this going, D..." She stops, takes a breath. "Captain?”

She looks away, relieved to see a stack of clothing folded on the side table. She needs to dress, to feel like someone solid again. Then she needs to find that Alex and talk to her, make sure that vision she saw before the drugs knocked her out was real. She sifts through the pile. A gauzy T-shirt and a button-down, both gray, and a pair of loose orange trousers of the type worn by engtechs. She turns away, pulling the rumpled hospital gown over her shoulders and listening with perverse satisfaction to Alex shifting uncomfortably in her seat. 

“Andrea Markham had a postdoc working under her at S.T.A.R. Labs.” Alex stands and starts a slow pace of the room. “A physicist named John Hammond. He'd been working on something in secret, a device.”

“The man at the chalkboard,” Maggie says, wondering how much she should divulge.

“They told me you’d intercepted his communique.”

“They?”

“Your companion,” Alex says. "That..." She stops herself.

Maggie’s got the T-shirt halfway over her head. She stops, arms raised, the cloth pressing down against her face. The room is tinged gray through the mesh.

“Her name is Alex.” She tugs the shirt down and faces her. Alex stares, a challenge in her eyes, but says nothing. She closes up again, reverting to the stiffness of that uniform.

“Maggie, S.T.A.R. Labs isn’t there anymore. Nothing is.”

A silence stretches between them and Maggie searches the planes in Alex’s face for meaning. There’s a hollowness in her gaze, as if she’s reached the edge of her old confidence, in reason, in the science in which she's long staked her faith. It’s the most unsettling thing Maggie’s ever seen.

“Why didn’t we get anything over the pulse? An accident of that magnitude would have--”

Alex is shaking her head. “Because we contained it. The west end of the city is blocked off tighter than the former DMZ. It’s a dead zone, Maggie. I can’t…” She gives a rapid, dazed shake of her head.

Maggie has one leg in the trousers and nearly loses her balance. It’s not like Alex, so precise in her science talk she was rarely comprehensible on the first go, to speak in such vague terms.

“He…” Alex lifts a hand, stares at her outstretched fingers. “He punched a hole right through reality.”

Maggie feels her body go cold. Some part of her hoped she was wrong, that her wild hunch about the gemel saving humanity from themselves was a reverie brought on by isolation. Alex steps over to the water dispenser. She downs a cup, then crumples and tosses it into the regen chute. It pings to indicate a successful recycle, and she squeezes her eyes shut as an alarm has gone off. She starts pressing at the scar again.

“Are you okay?” Maggie asks. 

“Fine,” Alex says. She rubs at her temple. “I don’t know how else to describe it. To look at it is…” She turns back. “Remember those installations you used to drag me to?”

“Which one?” Maggie says.

There were a lot. Maggie’s love of art and Alex’s penchant for natural history museums was a difference that made things better between them, where they learned from and complemented each other. Alex might grumble after an hour staring at antique television sets playing ocean scenes on a loop, or sitting on a bench in a darkened warehouse, hands clasped, waiting for strokes of faint light to surface from the darkness, scenes emerging as much from within as without. But later, they’d be folding laundry together or taking a stroll through a park, and Alex would suddenly light up, tell Maggie about an insight she’d had, how something at the exhibit had shifted the way she saw the world. “The only other place I’ve felt that kind of thing is up there,” she’d say, gazing up into the night sky. “So… thank you, Sawyer. For boring me silly.”

“There was that show, that woman from New Cydonia.” Alex closes her eyes again. “I forgot her name.”

“Amanda Wong?” 

Alex shakes her head. “No. No. It was the one with a fox… in a field. But not a natural one. It was like it was walking into another dimension. This space that warped what it was.”

“Noemi Sari,” Maggie says. They’d taken a trip to L.A. for their one-month anniversary. One of the exhibits had a fox wandering into a stasis field, objects floating around it, a grid of hands and empty soda cups, entire cities the size of index cards arranged uniformly. All of them hanging on nothing. She _should_ remember this; it’s part of their canon, but Alex just stares at Maggie, her eyes searching for the details she can’t fill in, and Maggie feels her chest tighten. It’s lonely being on this end of a memory, taking on that burden for the one no longer sharing it. Is this what gemel Alex experiences when they speak of Maggie’s past?

“At the Hammer Museum? She was the first artist to use anti-grav plates, remember? That’s how I convinced you to go?” She offers a smile, hopes for anything that it will drive that stricken look from Alex’s face.

Alex blinks. That layer of professional cool drawing back over confusion and fear. “Yes. That’s the one. Of course. It’s like that. It’s like this mirror space, what was there is frozen and warped on some kind of event horizon. Torn into these uniform shards of what was.”

“How did you contain it?”

“Hammond’s device was incomplete,” Alex says. “Markham says it would have required the generation of Casimir energy on a massive scale. The hole collapsed, just not all the way. It’s still releasing traces of tangent particles.”

Maggie squints at her. “What’s your cover story?”

Alex snorts and loosens her stance. “Radon.”

“Proverbial weather balloon,” Maggie says. She slips on a pair of canvass boots, made to stick in weightless environments, a requirement on military ships. “And Hammond?”

“Gone.” Alex shudders, a look of revulsion creeping over her. “We searched his house, found the communiques to and from Vinkonour. Markham was away at a conference the weekend he pressed the 'on' button, thankfully. If she hadn’t been, we’d have no idea of what we’re dealing with.”

Maggie fastens the straps on the boots and straightens. “And what are we dealing with?” 

Alex dips her head and sighs, but as she draws back up, her body tenses, shifting back into the hard persona that greeted Maggie upon waking. She pauses for a moment, measuring her words.

She only needs one.

“Gemel.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thank you to Thelxiope1 for providing that second translation of Akhmatova's poem. It hurts how much it fits them.
> 
> The inspiration for Alex and Maggie's art date is here...  
> https://fristartmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/claire_morgan_gg.pdf
> 
> If Alex and Maggie have a theme in this story, it's this (which I only discovered last week). This guy's whole catalog is amazing.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRMqBLCC1pE
> 
> I'm currently working on an update for SttS, so the next chapter of this will be up in a week to ten days. Thank you for reading!


End file.
